Subject: Re: updates
From: Derick Centeno (aguila@macol.net)
Date: Tue Jan 23 2001 - 11:23:02 MST
Greetings:
Jason McIntosh, thank you. I actually enjoyed reading your comments. I
will try your suggestions. Your sense of cutting humor, and how you
make a point is admirable. As for my errors, well I don't mind being
caught here. I consider this forum a learning opportunity -- a
community hall, to provide an image, where people can meet, joke and
address specific issues. You did not disappoint me.
I am pleased that you've been fortunate to have experience with
Solaris. But my experience has been totally lacking in this area. I
have heard of Sun, as much as I heard about Apollo, Prime and Symbolic.
I've visited many colleges, and many have no Sun on campus, nor have
plans to get any. One "Engineering" school I know of only has one Sun;
they actually keep it locked up and out of use. I overheard that the
problem was that it was too expensive to keep updated. Again I remember
reading somewhere, probably on MacCentral how IBM helped a university
replace a whole "farm" or bunch of Suns with a Linux system. Isn't
"power", a function of usefulness and, in truth, doesn't that change
according to passions or whims, not needs or economics?
The house of cards we live in and how they are arranged may be very much
more flexible and in flux than what our unique solid visual fields may
convey. Atoms, for instance are made up mostly of vast space, yet
dishes, and other items remain steady or appear to be so. Could it be
our sense of what goes on and why be a bit incomplete? Of course! We
are immersed in the unknown! The danger is to believe the fictions or
theories we create whereas they are tools only approximating a
description, to be "facts", as the thing itself.
A minor point but wasn't it the case that for all Macs -- even the first
one, even then one needed special programs to open up certain files. In
other words, you couldn't merely use Simpletext or Teachtext -- you had
to acquire something like Resedit or DeskEdit before you could access
the innards of Mac OS components, such as an Extension, and modify its
properties in hex. I'm sure these programs weren't available to the
public generally (ie. came with their Macs when they bought them) and
for them, the Mac OS was a closed system. Again for the community of
people attending this forum I would accept the premise that this group
is not the "common" group of users.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Tue Jan 23 2001 - 11:23:32 MST