Re: Wanted: talented programmers

On 7 Aug 2008 groups163@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

On Aug 6, 9:33 pm, druck <n...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Its your choice whether you want to continue to wall yourself off in
an ever smaller corner of the internet and keep hoping a miracle will
bring you a modern browser that will run on ancient hardware, or two
miracles that there might be any new faster native hardware. Or you
could invest in a tool that actually does the job, and opens up all
the possibilities you keep denying yourself. Now that you don't have
to submit to Microsoft to achieve this, there isn't any excuse apart
from sheer maschocism. I'm afraid thats the best advice I can give
RISC OS users.

The reason is to support RISC hardware and software.

But why?

I've advocated RISC OS as long and hard as I could, to maintain a
home grown development community and an alternative to the hegemony
of the dangerous Microsoft mono culture. But there comes a point
where it is a disservice to everyone to continue to push against
the overwhelming reality that restricting yourself to RISC OS, is
making your life unnecessarily more difficult, and imposes
considerable restrictions on what you are able to do online.

I still use RISC OS for a number of things, where there are great
applications which I am familiar with, and the hardware can just
about still cope with the data sizes. But things have moved on,
computers are no longer standalone systems relying totally on the
qualities of their OS and applications.

Around 95% of my time is spent dealing with online content and apps,
and the underlying OS matters very little, as long as it stable,
doesn't require constant maintance, updates and intrusive antivirus
tools (i.e. not Windows) I don't really care whats under Firefox.

Just as the before the graphical interface you may have used a system
with a fantastic command line interface, it soon became insignificant
when you used a windowing system, so the internet has reduced the
importance of the OS. Its just an envitable step on the path of
progress. Remember a computer is just a tool to get a job done, not
an end in itself, or something which should command pseudo-religious
zeal.

I question that its "increasingly" small as well given that history
shows over time we have greater and greater access to the web.

It should be pretty obvious that there isn't going to be any further
major increase in internet capability for RISC OS, on RISC OS
hardware. Not to belittle the excellent work continuing on NetSurf, by
their own admissions its never going to offer all the capabilities of
Firefox with a full set of plug-ins, and even if it did, like Firefox
it wouldn't run at sufficient speed, and would likely to become Linux
only.

While there are still talented RISC OS programers, involved in ROOL,
and developing Artworks, NetSurf, Messenger Pro and a number of other
useful applications, I'm not advocating abandoning the platform. But
reading the constant calls for better internet capabilities on one
hand, and the desperate self denial of those restricting themself to
RISC OS browsers on the other, it is time to realise there are tools
which can make your life better, and you wont go straight to hell if
it features a penguin logo rather than a cog or nut.

---druck

--
The ARM Club Free Software - http://www.armclub.org.uk/free/
The 32bit Conversions Page - http://www.quantumsoft.co.uk/druck/
.

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