The @when user key function/feature....

[Brian K. White]

On 10/27/2010 4:15 PM, Richard Kreiss wrote:
> Brian,
>
> I don't think John deserves that type of language thrown at him from anyone
> on the list.
>
> John posted one email with a link to a demonstration of how Anzio with
> scanning can be used with filePro.
>
> You posted at least 4 emails about your terminal emulation project.  It
> seems to me that you're annoyed with John for strongly recommending Anzio as
> a terminal emulator when you are working on you own.

No I was not annoyed at all about promoting Anzio. I promote Anzio as 
the best solution myself more than any other thing. I tried years ago to 
get Aljex to switch from Facetwin to Anzio, my life would have been 
soooo much easier the last several years. But even though Bob worked 
with me and provided answers to the _real_ blockers, in the end we 
couldn't switch for no valid reason at all. Tom just didn't want to. 
Said some silly thing about the choice of hot keys in the menus not 
being standard with most other windows apps? Considering Bob had 
graciously worked out answers to _real_ problems like
"I dont' want users to ever enter a license number"
and
"I need to be able to launch a preconfigured session from a web page"
I gave up when something stupid like "Alt-E isn't Edit" was a problem. 
To me that means there is no reason he just didn't want to switch and 
everyone else can just live with it.

But for the record, had I my choice a whole lot of desks would be 
running Anzio right now and not FacetWin.

The only reason I started talking about the putty fork is because

A) It exists and does many of the same things for free.

B) It just recently got good enough to be useful for anyone else. That 
was simple coincidental timing.

C) We have been doing the same sort of scanning into filepro records 
since about 2001 and the tools are either free or so cheap as to be 
nominal (a one-time $399 purchase for all your customers life? Unlimited 
clients, unlimited servers, and no one ever has to enter a licence 
number in all that time just click & go? No-brainer.) So I did feel 
compelled to pint out that cool as this is, it's not really that amazing 
or new and you can do it any time without being tied to any particular 
terminal emulator. There are several command-line twain scanner apps out 
there, and they all have similar one-time pricing, or you can buy 
individual seats for $60-$90 each but that's silly when $400 gets you 
unlimited. And all of those can be used by any terminal emulator that 
has an exec() command, which includes Anio, AniTa, FacetWin, my doctored 
putty, TUN, and probably several others that I just don't know about. 
You don't need mine, or anzio or any at all because it can work right 
from a web page.

But I'm not bothered by Anzio at all. There is no competition. I'm not 
selling this open source one. It's open.

And Anzio is in my opinion the ultimate swiss army knife of terminals. I 
say terminal, not terminal emulator, because "terminal emulator" is just 
one little part of Anzio. The whole package is a powerful and uber 
useful whole terminal thanks to printwizard and the dictionary full of 
special escape commands, and integrated image viewer, integrated file 
transfer, I think there is even TAPI stuff to control phones and modems? 
Not to mention the new twain scanner stuff, and I'm sure that you can do 
more with the built-in twain support in Anzio than you can with external 
apps and other terminals. (except not need a terminal at all, or not 
care what terminal the user has.)

The reason I feel compelled to point out that there are alternatives are 
for the same reason Wonder John himself just felt compelled to point out 
oh so sadly that as great as FacetWin is, this other thing is really 
better. Well, as great as Anzio is, both FacetWin _and_ this fork of 
putty have certain advantages. Facetwin actually still wins over Anzio 
for one key reason in my opinion when it comes to vertical integration 
the way pretty much everyone on this list uses terminal emulators, which 
is that for the end user, the client is free to download and there is no 
license or serial number to enter. Just click & go. All licensing 
hassles are on the server and the burden is all on the system admin. For 
the users it's brainless. I've now made putty equally effortless for the 
user and without the limitations of facetwin. No proprietary server 
daemon like facetwin. No licenses anywhere on the server or client. And 
thanks to the exec() command you can do a lot of the stuff that built in 
to Anzio using external commands, and as I've done, you can bundle those 
commands together with putty to make a package that acts like those 
things are built-in. (scanning, file-transfer, printing eventually). And 
all of it is not only free as in beer, but free as in speech. It's 
impossible to ever be taken away or stop working or get you sued. Locked 
in garanteed safety for life. Now, really, even granted the fact that 
this free stuff is less feature rich than some commercial products, how 
in the world is this not a good thing?

I _am_ very bothered however by the way John treats others and then 
apparently by the power of his charisma just gets away with it. No one 
notices or at least no one says anything. Imagine that same discussion 
face to face, you or someone says whatever it is they're saying, and 
John says to the rest of the room, "I don't know what that guy was just 
talking about, something about freedom, I just ignored the rest but hey 
look what I have to say!" Anyone would want to punch him in the nose.

So yeah. I love him too most of the time. He is in fact damned charming 
and interesting. But he can also be an asshole and there's no excuse for it.

-- 
bkw