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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.bhp.com.au!mel.dit.csiro.au!actcsiro!news.nsw.CSIRO.AU!wabbit.its.uow.edu.au!news.ci.com.au!newshost.telstra.net!act.news.telstra.net!psgrain!newsfeed.internetmci.com!tank.news.pipex.net!pipex!dispatch.news.demon.net!demon!sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk!yama.mcc.ac.uk!zippy.dct.ac.uk!str-ccsun!not-for-mail Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.development.system,comp.unix.bsd.386bsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.os.linux.advocacy Subject: Re: Historic Opportunity facing Free Unix (was Re: The Lai/Baker paper, benchmarks, and the world of free UNIX) Message-ID: <4lgq8c$ffc@vulture.dmem.strath.ac.uk> From: nbc@vulture.dmem.strath.ac.uk (Neil Brendan Clark) Date: 22 Apr 1996 21:30:04 +0100 References: <4ki055$60l@Radon.Stanford.EDU> <4l2u61$fdg@solaria.cc.gatech.edu> <4l8o73$i28@news.missouri.edu> <4laudl$q55@news.duke.edu> Organization: University of Strathclyde NNTP-Posting-Host: vulture.dmem.strath.ac.uk Lines: 56 Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.development.system:21906 comp.unix.bsd.386bsd.misc:734 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:3378 comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:3217 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:17800 comp.os.linux.advocacy:46508 Charles Reese <reese@chem.duke.edu> wrote: >I have >written macros that can accept raw data files from our instruments, load >them into word, reformat them into tables, transfer them to Excel >spreadsheets, do some preliminary math operations and then write them to >files that MATLAB can read. This is more or less exactly the kind of work I have done with UNIX in the past and present, i.e. collection and presentation of real data. The various tools available under UNIX provided an excellent basis for this, allowing formatting of the input data, simple mathematical operations and presentation of whatever you want - tables, graphs and so on, with the bonus that it only took me a few days to write the scripts and so on. I am not a shell script guru by any means BTW - I have met people who could do this sort of thing in an hour or two, or even less... It's not that I'm being insulting here or anything, I'm merely stating that UNIX is amazing at the type of things you are doing. >This sysinstall program could be expanded a bit, for instance it would be >nice if one could change the setting for some of the devices. You can do this - when booting you will see a kernel prompt. Type -c in it before it goes away and you get a nice "visual" (cringe ;) editor. >What 'Windows' users don't want in an OS. >NO COMPILING (at least no known compiling). But compiling is good, as long as you don't *have* to do it! For example, to compile a program for FreeBSD so that it is optimized for your machine, Here's what you do; (in this case I'll compile xearth) cd /usr/ports/x11/xearth make install And that's it. The files are fetched automatically, the man pages and so on are all installed in the right places, and even better, if I want to uninstall it, I just type; pkg_delete xearth-1.0 How less difficult could it be? In addtion, with a compiler available, there's always the opportunity to do some programming if the need ever takes you. That's how I and many others got into computing in the first place. >To ask me to compile a program is like me asking you to run a synthetic >reaction. No it's not, it's like me asking you to type a few lines! See above! ;-) Unfortunately you are right in many respects in that people using MS products are incredibly partisan. IMHO it's very sad :-( -- Neil Clark Transparent Telepresence Group <http://telepresence.dmem.strath.ac.uk/>