[Oberon] A4 ? was: Re (2): Oberon Digest, Vol 104, Issue 2

[eas lab]

>> IMO adults/experienced-users shouldn't be using graphical-browsers.

Bob Walkden writes:-
>why?

Eye-candy, like junk-food & smoking can have long-term bad-effects.
OTOH, for illiterates: pictures, cartoon & comics are magic & effective.
In the 90's the ratio of email-lines to intelligent-contents was
40 : 25.    Now its 90-lines envelope for 2.5 lines contents.
Intelligence is being swamped by garbage.

If you fetch 8 'pages' from a web-site, they'll all contain the SAME
20-80% 'packaging'.  Like in old times, periodicals had 6 part articles,
each wrapped in a 40 page periodical.

Surfing is going nowhere while waiting to fall off.
Browsing is for kiddies. Adults do planned, targetted fetches.

So it you want an N-part 'article' from http, you can construct a 'book'
containing related 'articles' [with TOC on top], conveniently by:
    AppendSeparatorLine&URLheaderForALL  FileOfURLs   BookFile

But then you find that the appended 'pages' of your book are 70%
repetition. Which you can you delete, while reading it.
Which is an example of, instead of getting dirty & broken through
use, the book gets cleaner and wiser.

With the assistance of USEnet collaborators, I've made a utility
which hooks into an editor to:
    DeleteAllFurtherCopiesOfThisBlockIgnoringWhiteSpaces..etc.
which is good for 20 related-fetches, which are all appended
to the same file, and where deleting the inevitable much repeated
text is tedious if done manually.
---------------.

Jack writes:-
> I think another distinction between multithreaded vs task-loop behavior is
> the OS vs human attention timeslice, right? Under the simple task-loop,
> things like network behavior were inherently tricky to juggle -- do you
> force the user to wait indefinitely for the FTP download to complete, or
> do you slice it up to allow continuation of other tasks and potentially
> risk losing the transfer via some future threadhog?

Yes, you've just reminded me: LEO *IS* 'broken' eg. that when running.
pop-fetch-mail, it may crash, if I switch to another console/task.
I've forgotten about that little problem, since I work-around it eg, by
<do append fetches> as described above, and THEN go to LEO-fetch-popmail,

> What's nice about AOS as a system is that if you prefer how ETHO behaves
> you can live in a System 3 environment (heck, you could probably construct
> a V4 environment if that suited you),.

I've been using V4 under linux for some years; and like the way it auto
detects if the file-to-open is ETHO or linux format, and that the font/color
selection is ON each text frame.  But I can't understand the <start script>
and never figured how to 'invoke it AT any dir-tree-node'. Like with LEO:
when the contents of any dir is problematic [contains 6 files that need to be
read/write/paste together], you just open a new LEO 'there'.

> and allow a natural interface to a lower-level of the OS that might
> want or need to interact with the rest of the planet with a different
> synchronicity, allowing some kind of blend of an atomic user interaction
> with a multifaceted running process.

I was hoping that AOS's IDE was better than dumb-typing-in-code from memory,
but I never even got to the stage of being able to copy a text-file out
of the CD-booted AOS, to a hard-disk or USB-stik.
== Chris Glur