[MUD-Dev] Re: Finer points of Telnet programming ...

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 09:29 PM 8/25/98 -0700, I personally witnessed Adam Wiggins jumping up
to say:
>On Sun, 23 Aug 1998, Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote:
>> Okay, so I'm developing under Windows 9x. Everyone says this is stupid, but
>> I tend to think that if your platform has a problem, you work around it.
>[snip]
>
>OS wars aside, I think the reason you'll frequently encounter surprise is
>that 95/98 aren't considered servers. 

About five years ago, I ran a damn effective multiplayer game (which later
proved to have been quite possibly the first online World of Darkness game
ever, if I could just come up with some proof of the date I started it)
over an 8-line BBS running on a 286 PC with 2 megs of RAM and 85 megs of
hard disk. 

They didn't call that a server, either. What they DID call a server was a
386 or 486, with at least 8 megs of RAM (16 if you were rich), a math
coprocessor (if you wanted to show off and had applications that would use
it), and three hundred megs of hard disk (five hundred if you NEVER wanted
to run out of space).

Now, I look at my machine, and I have ten to twenty times that power right
here. And I look at the 486, and say "server", and I look at my machine,
and I say "not server", and somehow that just feels wrong. This machine can
outperform a lot of the mainframes I've worked on. Why isn't it a server?

The definition of "server" in my book is "a machine with services which
other machines can access over the network". Windows 9x can run the single
greatest web server of all time (O'Reilly WebSite), which in my book
indicates that Windows 9x is a "not server" only because the services
aren't there for it to provide.


There *is* a solution to this problem. I think it's pretty obvious.

>By the same token, if you
>proclaimed that you were going to use Corel Draw to write your master's
>thesis, people would ask "Why not use WordPerfect instead?"  A response
>of "because I know Corel Draw, I don't want to take the time to learn
>WordPerfect" will probably leave people fairly confused.

Bad analogy. VERY bad analogy. Unix and Windows have very *similar* jobs.
CorelDraw and WordPerfect have very *different* jobs. Let's try a better
example...

I know Paint Shop Pro, so I will design my company's logo in that instead
of in PhotoShop. If I were a PhotoShop expert *and* a Paint Shop Pro
expert, I would design a better logo in PhotoShop because it has more and
better tools as well as a better all-around graphics engine. 

Let's pretend I am not a PhotoShop user. When I design something in
PhotoShop, I have trouble finding what I want and applying it correctly and
getting it to look the way I want. I get frustrated. I get discouraged. It
doesn't do what I want. It doesn't look like I expect. I have to do things
I wouldn't have to in Paint Shop Pro. It takes me an hour and a half to
design the logo. It doesn't look right. 

I open Paint Shop Pro. I know where everything is. I know what I want to
do. I know how to do it. I design the logo smoothly, quickly, and easily in
about ten minutes. It looks just like I wanted it to. 

I compare the two images. I like the Paint Shop Pro version. It's what I
wanted. I look at the PhotoShop version, and it isn't what I wanted to
make, and it doesn't look right, and it reminds me of how frustrated I was
when I was building it. I don't like it. I delete it. I use the Paint Shop
Pro version.

Now someone comes up and tells me that PhotoShop would have done a better
job on the logo. In fact, not only would PhotoShop have done a better job
on it, but I would be a better person for having used PhotoShop. So I say I
tried to do it in PhotoShop, and I didn't like what came out in the end. 

Most PhotoShop jockeys will probably respond that PhotoShop only makes good
images when you are good at using it, or that while PhotoShop will produce
great artwork it is still up to the user to create great art, or that I am
weird. 

That's about how things work with operating systems, too. All of them do
the same basic things, but there's one out there somewhere that fits how
you want to work. For me, that's Windows. For you, that's evidently Unix. 

Guess what? That's okay! ;)

---
=+[ caliban at darklock.com ]=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=[ http://www.darklock.com/ ]+=
"It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more 
doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a 
new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by 
the preservation of the old institution, and merely lukewarm defenders in 
those who would gain by the new one."              -- Niccolo Machiavelli
=+=+[ FREE KEVIN * http://www.kevinmitnick.com/ * IT COULD BE YOU ]+=+=+=