Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!van-bc!ubc-cs!cheddar.cc.ubc.ca!halliday From: halliday@cheddar.cc.ubc.ca (Laura Halliday) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: Remote NeXT Users, etc. Summary: You can't have everything. Message-ID: <5103@ubc-cs.UUCP> Date: 24 Sep 89 23:45:47 GMT References: <8248@oregon.uoregon.edu> Sender: news@cs.ubc.ca Reply-To: halliday@cc.ubc.ca (Laura Halliday) Organization: UBC Computing Centre, Vancouver, B.C., Canada Lines: 34 In article <8248@oregon.uoregon.edu> joe@oregon.uoregon.edu (Joe St Sauver) writes: >Remote Users -- Beyond the Pale? > >I agree with Joe Stone that NeXT is wrong to treat remote users as if they are >beyond the pale just because they aren't sitting in from of a MegaPixel >display. > > (stuff deleted...) > >The existence of documentation locked into WriteNow-only format is one example >of NeXT's hubris, as is being told that Preferences is "the" way to change >user passwords. (more deleted...) To a certain extent, you have a point; perhaps some of these beefs will be fixed, if not in 1.0, then maybe in 1.1. Face it, though: unless you use something like X Windows, remote users *are* second class citizens...as an example, I'm composing this message from home, using my modem and running a terminal emulation program on my PS/2. The machine at the other end is a Sun-3/280, but I can't run Sunview remotely. I can't become the super user remotely. There are many things I can't do remotely. So what? People who are grumbling about WriteNow documentation, rather than grumbling, should sit down and hack together the nroff analogue of WriteNow, so that they can see online documentation in a restricted but still legible manner. You're going to lose a lot of what makes NeXT special, and I honestly don't know what you're going to do about pictures, but, if WriteNow works the way I think it does, it shouldn't be too much of a hassle. Put a NeXT on my desk and I could do a first approximation to such a program in a couple of hours. So could you. Don't grumble; go do it. ...laura