ric@rioja.ifs.umich.edu (Richard Campbell) (03/08/90)
Thanks Jim for the inside information. I'm glad that NeWS
development is back on the high-priority list for Sun.
Peter Korp writes:
Would it not be a wonderful thing if the leading people in
NeWS development would come together and share their ideas
and philosophies with Sun.
Wasn't there an organization called "Open Vistas" or some such thing
which appeared to be a technical/vendor group boosting NeWS? I don't
recall seeing a booth at the D.C. Uniforum, but it was at previous
technical shows - Hugh, weren't you involved??
Richard Campbellneil@AKOLEA.SOEST.HAWAII.EDU (03/10/90)
Let's not be so easily soothed. Our fears for NeWS are well-founded. Let's keep up the pressure on Sun to PUT NeWS IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN. No company is perfectly managed, and in this case it seems clear that Sun's management is making a mistake by keeping NeWS proprietary. We can help NeWS *and Sun* by keeping up the pressure.
toms@ncifcrf.gov (Tom Schneider) (03/12/90)
In article <9003091828.AA01983@elepaio.soest.hawaii.edu> neil@AKOLEA.SOEST.HAWAII.EDU writes: > PUT NeWS IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN. Seconded! By the way, somebody (sorry I lost the information) objected to my previous posting about NeWS. They thought that programming in NeWS was not good. My main reason for believing NeWS is technically superior has to do with the use one can put it to. I have always been interested in graphics and have seen many kinds appear and disappear in the last 16 years. I have been always frustrated by graphics that did not integrate what I put on a CRT with what I put onto my printer, because I use the graphics as notes in my scientific notebooks. NeWS, being based on PostScript FINALLY sidesteps this problem by using the same language on both places. I preview graphs on my screen, dump them to the printer for hard copy and dump them to disks for high quality figures in publications. This system can't be beat, it's the obvious logical way to go. Can you imagine having a different graphics language for every output device 50 years in the future? Ugh! I work with an X-based drawing program called 'fig' because it has a nicest set of icon-controls and doesn't bomb at every move I make (unlike a NeWS drawing program released not too long ago). But the thing is doomed because it does not have a way to manipulate characters. The characters appear one size on the screen but are not in the same location on the paper - one has to fight to make it work. One can't rotate anything in angles other than 90 degrees. Where is Sun's support for things like this that we all need to make our figures? And howcome Sun went to all the trouble to make 20 stupid terminal types on the standard NeWS interface, when ONE good one would have done the job? (Sorry, this one still bugs me because I STILL don't have something better than a shelltool to work with, see below... ) Finally, there was a posting recently on where to get psterm - but I forgot to transfer using binary and it wouldn't uncompress. Could somebody remind me where it is again? Thanks. Tom Schneider National Cancer Institute Laboratory of Mathematical Biology Frederick, Maryland 21701-1013 toms@ncifcrf.gov