learning burnout (was: Mac/Mac Programming/Cocoa/HyperTalk Books free - Melbourne)

On 12 December 2011 16:58, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote: I quite enjoy dabbling with new Linux GUIs and so on, but TBH, no. I stand by what I said. I started on a PET, dabbled with a ZX81 and then got my first computer of my own: a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Then I went to an Amstrad PCW9512, an odd choice of home computer perhaps. CP/M came as a bit of a shock but I'd used VMS at university and coped. Then came work and I learned MS-DOS and MacOS 6 and 7 and SCO Xenix. At home, I bought an Acorn Archimedes. much pain with that, a switch to Windows 95. Meanwhile for work I'd added Netware 2, 3 and 4, NT from 3.1, a bit of VMS. Windows from 2.01 - *every* single version, TTBOMK. I ran NT 3.51 for years at work, then NT 4, and I went from Win95 at home to NT4 there too. A brief flirtation with Caldera OpenLinux but back to Win2K and XP, which I abandoned to SUSE and thence Ubuntu, while also learning Mac OS X. Those are the main ones. I've also done jobs on System/36, PDP/11, AMOS, something arcane called CP/M that wasn't, AS/400, AIX, HP/UX, Cisco IOS on a PIX. I've fiddled with QNX and AmigaOS and Atari GEM and the Sinclair QL, and with SunOS and Solaris. And then there are the handhelds - EPOC16 and EPOC32 and Symbian, S60 and S80 and S90 and UIQ, Newton, Android, iOS, Blackberry and so on. BeOS and Haiku. FreeBSD and PC-BSD. And many more I can't call to mind. I'm tired of it. If I had the money, to be honest, I'd run Mac OS X on a fast iMac on the desktop and Ubuntu on an IBM Thinkpad as a portable. Some things work these days. Others don't. Permissions and security are a hideously complex mess on Windows and not much better on OS X. Networking has collapsed down to SMB and HTTP over TCP/IP, more or less, but even that is a horrid mess and that's without IPv6. GUIs work quite well now. Windows has been going downhill since Windows 2000 but I don't hate Win7. I choose not to use it but I could if I had to. OS X is generally pleasant but Lion is a bit weird. And yet, after all this time, I can't get a decent text-mode editor for my Linux servers. Emacs is the lurking blasphemous horror it was 30y ago, vi is just so embarrassingly primitive I can't believe it's survived, and the handful of alternatives are stone-aged. (Joe? Nano? You're having a laugh, aren't you?) I mean, come on, guys, CUA won the war, it was over a quarter of a century ago. It's more than time. At least on my desktop I can use X and Gedit. It's all right. (SETedit -- http://setedit.sourceforge.net/ -- was lovely but it died of lack of interest.) I want my computers to just /work/. I expected all the complexity and arcane crap to be banished 15 years ago. I was wrong. It's a good job I didn't dream of ActiveDirectory; I'd have quit and gone and lived in a cave if I knew what was coming. Sure, I love interesting old machines from the past. My current area of interest is Lisp Machines and Lisp itself, although I doubt I'll ever use an actual one. I think there's a lot that could be learned badly, today. But really? I am tired of fiddling and fettling and coaxing into continued life. I want computers that I can just talk to, tell what I want and that just do it, with no more maintenance than a toaster. We're well into the 2nd decade of the 21st century. I know I'm not going to get flying cars or jetpacks, but I did expect computers to have got further, as opposed to just smaller, faster and more capacious, but just as capricious. -- Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508