howard@amdahl.amdahl.com (The Toolmaster) (07/23/87)
In article <603@hydra.riacs.edu> julian@hydra.riacs.edu.UUCP (Julian E Gomez) writes: >In article <443@eplrx7.UUCP> lad@eplrx7.UUCP (Lawrence Dziegielewski) writes: >: In article <10252@amdahl.amdahl.com>, howard@amdahl.amdahl.com (The Toolmaster) writes: >: > >PS - "System V - Consider It Standard." >: > PS - BSD4.x - Consider it Adhoc. >: >: I do not consider Sys V a standard. In engineering, 4.x is the standard. >: We here at the Engineering Physics Lab have one Motorola machine running Sys >: V, and it's a real bear working on it after I've been using my bsd 4.3 >: system from Mt Xinu all day. > > >I don't consider it a standard either. Nor do most universities >and research institutions. > >SYS V lacks too many useful features that 4.x supports as standard. >"Enhanced" versions are only slightly better. It qualifies more as >"ad hoc" than 4.xBSD, especially since they've had so many years to >study and learn from a good example. AT&T can start by supporting >control-Z and signal(SIGSTOP... and signal(SIGCONT..., which are much >more useful to me for development than shared memory. Ah, that's what I like, controversy. How's this; I agree, I agree, and we're going to do something about it. How about: POSIX, consider it the future standard? Oh, who cares anyway. Now, since a flame type posting is a general waste of bandwidth, here's something MacInteresting. I just received (and put into production) MacInUse version 2.0. Major improvements. For those who don't know, MacInUse is an Application that will deposit an Init on your system that will track the usage of the applications you run. Then later, you can use the application to read the data file created and run MacWrite or Word (either version) or Works or Excel (yeah, this is the good one) to analyze and even maybe graph the usage of the machine. What good is all this you ask? Justify more Macs! The new version allows you to choose various parameters like the minimum time an application must be run to be tracked, whether to track the finder, whether to ask the user anything either before or after the application runs and a few other things. The big thing is the dialog for the user. You have a lot of control in customizing it for your outfit. The old(standard) dialog had a pair of radio buttons that said Business or Personal and a Comment box. With V2.0 you can have up to 10 buttons in a button area and of course label them anything you want, and have text entry boxes and label them, and generally change the label on just about anything. You can even make a text entry box manditory. And you can set the default button in a set. I set our lab Mac up with a dialog that details 9 different departments and a tenth button marked Other that has a text field below it with a comment asking you to fill in the name of the dept.. This dialog is set to come up after the application quits. So far, so great. The latest version can also track applications under switcher (claimed but not tested yet, Switcher on the SE has its own set of problems) and if you want to create a forced entry at some time, like record your usage of a DA, an FKEY allows you to bring up the dialog and make an entry. So, how much for all this you ask? Well, retail is $79 and Computerware is probably a bit less. For V1.0 users, the upgrade is $10. All in all, seems worth it. BTW, if your saying, "what use is this to the average home consumer?" Well this is just what the doctor ordered for tax time and trying to show those "contemporaneous" records of usage for business/investment/charity/whatever usage that's deductible. That is, if you don't just write the whole thing off to education. So, that'll about do it for me. Must admit, still no sign of Word3.01. On the tidbit side, I have a friend that mentioned the "Hypercard" program from Bill Atkinson (I believe its been rumored as named Wildcard) and said something about it blowing away the Owl product (Guide). Also, if you use "Laserspool", the postscript style spooler, the version supporting Laserprep 4.0 is shipping now. I'm outta news, may all yours be good, -- "Plan for the future because that's where you Howard C. Simonson are going to spend the rest of your life." {hplabs,ihnp4,nsc}!amdahl!howard - Mark Twain - [ The disclaimer for this message may be found in my next article ]