> From: "Geo." 
> "Adam Flinton"  wrote in message
> news:b0932f.5838ca{at}harborwebs.com...
>> Possibly. However I'm not sure you're correct anymore. The world is
> becoming in
>> many ways more hetergeneous wrt computing than it was. You now have PDA'es
>> which are more powerfull than old PC'es. You now have mobile phones which
> are
>> getting that powerfull. However what is a great GUI for a 17" high res
> monitor
>> may not be a good GUI for a dinky little Mobilephone/PDA screen.

> different markets, cel phones don't gravitate because it's such a simple
> device. 

Maybe they are in the US but that's possibly just coz the US is behind on
mobile phone adoption & tech. Take the new Nokia communicator or any of
the upcoming 3G phones. They are powerfull computers in their own right. 

> Maybe someday if you can add lots of extra options they will for
> compatibility reasons but now it's not that type of market. Same for PDA's,
> there just isn't the addon market to require standardizations.

Not true. Even my father (who has a palm) has bought add-on s/w (& his
comp provided some). My Son d/l'es games onto his nokia just as often as he
can persuade me to pay for em.


>> It's like Bash vs ksh vs csh etc. In accordance with your theory by now
> there
>> should only be one & yet each carries on quite happily.
> Nope, they didn't have the addon market either, you have to reach a critical
> mass of both users and developers before standardization becomes a
> requirement. Even Linux hasn't reached that point yet and it's by far the
> most popular unix ever.

Really? If you want to (say) install DB2 then you need KSH installed. Time
after time the scripting shell is item 1 on a s/w req list as all the
install scripts are written in one of them.

My'self the first thing I do on solaris is check for bash & if not
installed, see if I can get it installed. If it is then setting the shell
to bash is the first line of my env setup script.

Adam

> Geo.

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