mo@messy.bellcore.com (Michael O'Dell) (12/04/90)
Funny things happen in the mind of a company when considering
the interaction between cost and price. It has happened
time and again: some company with a shiny new gizmo has said
to themselves: "our wonderful new gizmo cost a lot to develop,
so it ought to be worth a lot. [fallacy #1] But we're afraid it might not
sell a lot of units [possibly betraying the depth of their faith in its
wonderfulness], so in order to "recover our development
costs" we'll charge a lot for it." [fallacy #2]
The problem is that this usually produces the exact opposite of what is
desired. The reasons are simple. The worth of a product, and hence a
supportable price, is established by CUSTOMERS (ie, what they will pay for it
is based on their expectations and past experiences) [hence fallacy #1],
and that intensely myopic bean-counters often insist on cost-recover over
the first 100 units ("recovering the NRE" - almost a contradiction in terms,
but such things never bother this-quarter-oriented bean-counters).
So, you make the price sort-of high - and it doesn't make you a lot of money,
so what do you do? Add a few more features but then RAISE the price in
order to "accelerate the per-unit recovery". Of course, this drives
usually sales exactly the opposite way.
Business is funny this way.
I'm (honestly) not suggesting this applies to anyone or any product
in particular, just that this object lesson gets taught time and time again.
-Mike
"When Troff is outlawed, only outlaws will use -man."
PS - Oh yes, dear friends - having online man pages is FUNDAMENTAL to having
a UNIX system. If the man pages aren't there, it ain't Unix, no matter
what some bozo claims about its creat() system call.
Unix is about access to information. Don't ever forget that.rstevens@noao.edu (Rich Stevens) (12/04/90)
In article <1990Dec4.130922.6961@bellcore.bellcore.com> mo@messy.UUCP (Michael O'Dell) writes: > >PS - Oh yes, dear friends - having online man pages is FUNDAMENTAL to having >a UNIX system. Speaking of which, does anyone know the status of troff and man-pages for 4.4BSD ? There was talk (from Kirk McKusick, I think) 11 months ago at the DC Usenix BOF that they were trying to figure out how to handle the man pages when the non-AT&T 4.4 is finally released. As I recall, they were trying to get AT&T to release CAT troff to the public domain, or else they were going to reformat all the man pages in TeX and use TeX for the man pages. Rich Stevens
ronald@robobar.co.uk (Ronald S H Khoo) (12/05/90)
rstevens@noao.edu (Rich Stevens) writes: > Speaking of which, does anyone know the status of troff and man-pages > for 4.4BSD ? > [ ... ] > or else they were going to reformat all the man > pages in TeX and use TeX for the man pages. NO! PLEASE NO! Even shipping "awf" the "awf"ully slow nroff -m(s|an) replacement written in awk by Henry Spencer would be better than that! -- ronald@robobar.co.uk +44 81 991 1142 (O) +44 71 229 7741 (H)
msp33327@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Michael S. Pereckas) (12/05/90)
In <1990Dec4.133655.15047@noao.edu> rstevens@noao.edu (Rich Stevens) writes: >In article <1990Dec4.130922.6961@bellcore.bellcore.com> mo@messy.UUCP (Michael O'Dell) writes: >> >>PS - Oh yes, dear friends - having online man pages is FUNDAMENTAL to having >>a UNIX system. >Speaking of which, does anyone know the status of troff and man-pages >for 4.4BSD ? There was talk (from Kirk McKusick, I think) 11 months >ago at the DC Usenix BOF that they were trying to figure out how to >handle the man pages when the non-AT&T 4.4 is finally released. >As I recall, they were trying to get AT&T to release CAT troff to >the public domain, or else they were going to reformat all the man >pages in TeX and use TeX for the man pages. Then you have to figure out a good way to display them online. I like GNU Texinfo. It works fairly well, the price is right, and it is at least somewhat portable. (There is a DOS port of stand-alone texinfo utilities, for example.) Converting -man stuff to TeX is at least somewhat automatable. Converting to properly arranged texinfo is probably not. You could still use texinfo to display converted man pages in their traditional appearance, although that misses the point of texinfo. Frankly, every time I look at documents for troff, I get the feeling that I am looking at a binary. This is from a LaTeX user who doesn't use troff, so there is some bias, but TeX looks like a marked-up text file, troff like a mark-up file with a little text scattered about in it. -- Michael Pereckas * InterNet: m-pereckas@uiuc.edu * just another student... (CI$: 72311,3246) Jargon Dept.: Decoupled Architecture---sounds like the aftermath of a tornado
gtoal@tharr.UUCP (Graham Toal) (12/06/90)
In article <1990Dec4.211419.2599@robobar.co.uk> ronald@robobar.co.uk (Ronald S H Khoo) writes: >rstevens@noao.edu (Rich Stevens) writes: > >> Speaking of which, does anyone know the status of troff and man-pages >> for 4.4BSD ? >> [ ... ] >> or else they were going to reformat all the man >> pages in TeX and use TeX for the man pages. > >NO! PLEASE NO! Even shipping "awf" the "awf"ully slow nroff -m(s|an) >replacement written in awk by Henry Spencer would be better than that! I've just discovered 'texinfo' format from the FSF -- it is structurally marked-up help documentation -- use the 'texinfo.tex' header file & you get lovely TeX documentation; use the 'texinfo.el' package in gnu emacs and you get on-line ascii help info. I haven't actually used the latter, but the former works well. I suspect the ascii-output version (no TeX needed Ronald :-)) would make a fine basis for a 'man' replacement. Looking at some of the documents, the texinfo format seems to allow arbitrary links between bits of tex which I presume the interactive help program allows you to navigate. Perhaps an FSF'er could supply more info? Graham (I've crossposted, to catch more people who may know of this, but followups to comp.text please -- since the subject of this thread is about the lack of DWB on Unix systems nowadays) -- (* Posted from tharr.uucp - Public Access Unix - +44 (234) 261804 *)
buck@siswat.UUCP (A. Lester Buck) (12/06/90)
< >Speaking of which, does anyone know the status of troff and man-pages < >for 4.4BSD ? There was talk (from Kirk McKusick, I think) 11 months < >ago at the DC Usenix BOF that they were trying to figure out how to < >handle the man pages when the non-AT&T 4.4 is finally released. < >As I recall, they were trying to get AT&T to release CAT troff to < >the public domain, or else they were going to reformat all the man < >pages in TeX and use TeX for the man pages. < < Then you have to figure out a good way to display them online. < < I like GNU Texinfo. It works fairly well, the price is right, and it < is at least somewhat portable. (There is a DOS port of stand-alone < texinfo utilities, for example.) < < Michael Pereckas * InterNet: m-pereckas@uiuc.edu * < just another student... (CI$: 72311,3246) < Jargon Dept.: Decoupled Architecture---sounds like the aftermath of a tornado I was also at the BOF, and the BSD crew was asking for volunteers to recode many utilites to be AT&T clean. Several of these had GNU equivalents (such as Yet Another make), but they could not distribute GNU with BSD because many of their corporate "customers" can't abide by the GNU public license. So I think that may prevent the direct use of GNU Texinfo. I am all for the conversion to TeX, and the BSD guys seemed shocked at the level of support for switching to TeX expressed by the audience. --- A. Lester Buck buck@siswat.lonestar.org ...!uhnix1!lobster!siswat!buck -- A. Lester Buck buck@siswat.lonestar.org ...!uhnix1!lobster!siswat!buck
henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (12/07/90)
In article <1484@tharr.UUCP> gtoal@ed.ac.uk (Graham Toal) writes: >I've just discovered 'texinfo' format from the FSF -- it is >structurally marked-up help documentation -- use the 'texinfo.tex' >header file & you get lovely TeX documentation; use the 'texinfo.el' >package in gnu emacs and you get on-line ascii help info. There is just one problem: there is no standard "texinfo" format. Every new GNU author adds his own wrinkles to it. (This is according to the author of texi2roff, which converts texinfo to troff -- she's not too pleased with the steady proliferation of texinfo variants.) When last heard from, the BSD folks were sticking with troff for manual pages, but had decided to use a new macro package for the sake of much more structurally-oriented markup. -- "The average pointer, statistically, |Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology points somewhere in X." -Hugh Redelmeier| henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry