[Oberon] n-o: timer-reset chit-chat

[Vasile Rotaru]

easlab at absamail.co.za wrote:

> Very quiet here lately ?
Indeed.

> How many of you got nailed by the swen virus ?
> Many, judging from NewsGroup reports.
> Regretably (because 'bringing it out' would help the combined
> effort to fix it) many people like to be macho and deny problems.
>  I had to change:
>   eas-lab at absamail.co.za
> to:
>   easlab at absamail.co.za
> because my 10M mail-box quota was filling up each hour, with
> swen virii.

 I was affected also, but not that hard. I have choosen the "coward way"
out of this and I have added a filter to my server-side mailbox which
deletes every mail which is greater than 20000 bytes. Most unwanted
mails are.

> 
> The lack of these types of simple 'Howtos' for would be new users
> is one reason why n-o usage will never grow.
> 
> One reason is the academic snobbery, that Howtos are for the gutter.
> 
> 

  Well, unless something unexpected happens, n-o usage will never grow. As the FAQ says:  "The system is being maintained by volunteers", and even the latest release is "bitrotten" here and there. (The files generated by Coco wil not compile, for example).

  But, I guess, the "academic snobbery" is something we will just have to live with. "Akademiker"-s should be first and mainly interested in research.

  I remember to have heared about a dispute between Torvalds and Tannenbaum -- monolithic kernel versus microkernel. The monolithic kernels were not "hot stuff" when Torvalds wrote Linux, but this one happened to be wildly usefull.

  Maybe a "n-o.sourceforge.net" or something like this focused on "immeditate usability" may help, but I still doubt. You know computers nowadays can do a lot more, than just editing text and compiling programs, and people owning computers want to get the most of them. 

  Games, multimedia and so on. Besides, you may think that Mozilla is "indecent sofware" (I kind of do), but still, it implements the W3C standards and it is available. And there are more data formats which need "pig software" to treat them, and the Oberon(n-o) manpower is so limited... So, I'm rather sceptical. 

  Still, there would be no harm to open a thread about "Increasing the Oberon marketshare" and it may be even interesting.


Cheers, Vasile