Re: Where we stand in regard to the future platform / desktop technology

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Mon, 2004-03-29 at 01:21 +0100, Rui Miguel Seabra wrote:


> Besides, I'm terribly afraid of "viruses" starting to show up due to
> uneeded scripting...

Lack of good application scripting is one of the things that sucks most
about GNOME, and that both Windows and OS X have gotten very, very
right.  You can't control the desktop without using the UI itself, or
making UI-dependent atk-based scripts.  I've made some very heavy uses
of COM scripting in Windows, and in fact there've been times at my work
I've had to borrow a Windows machine with MS Office, Explorer, and Ruby
in order to put together some tasks that I should've been able to do
OpenOffice and Mozilla, but couldn't, because neither offered solid
external scripting facilities that could be easily used together from
the language I needed to use.

An attempt to secure the desktop by screwing the users out of powerful
and needed features instead of just securing the platform properly is
about as bad, if not worse, than any proprietary company "securing"
their software by hiding the code.  Users would rather have a system
that needs a virus scanner but at least does what they need than a
system that has no need for a virus scanner but can't get the work done
they need it to do.

> 
> Rui
> 
> -- 
> + No matter how much you do, you never do enough -- unknown
> + Whatever you do will be insignificant,
> | but it is very important that you do it -- Gandhi
> + So let's do it...?
> 
> Please AVOID sending me WORD, EXCEL or POWERPOINT attachments.
> See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.