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Letters to the Editor

Issue 49

From Issue #49
May 1998

May 01, 1998  By Various
 in
Readers sound off.
BTS

I think the first “corrupted terminal” answer on page 72 of the February 1998 issue needs some work:

  1. cat was NOT “designed to handle ASCII files.” cat conCATenates files to standard output (hence the name). It concatenates one or more files from argv, or if argv is empty, simply from stdin until EOF. There is nothing in cat or its documentation to suggest that it was designed for ASCII files, or could not handle binary files.

  2. cat does not “interpret a lot of the binary file as control sequences.” The terminal emulation supported by the console code (or an xterm) interprets any control sequences it is sent via any program that writes to it. These can come from any program. The terminal emulator is supposed to do this. It's why things like Pine and Emacs work, for example.

Here's a question for you: how many Linux seats are there, and how many new seats a month are there? Any idea?

—Ron Minnich rminnich@sarnoff.com

No idea. Vendors don't like to give their sales numbers to their competition, and those numbers would probably be the most accurate count. There is the Linux Counter, but not everyone knows about it or takes the time to register so its count is way low. If you haven't registered, go to http://counter.li.org/ and do so—now!

—Editor

Red Hat CDE

I recently saw the review of Red Hat CDE by Don Kuenz in the January edition of LJ, and decided to buy the software. However, on filling in the order, I saw that the January price for CDE was 25% higher than the price advertised in LJ. I think it's unfortunate that the information in the published review was out of date before I even received the magazine. I am also disappointed that Red Hat, while obviously benefitting from the PR of this review, are not prepared to honour the advertised price.

—Dr. Steven Bird Steven.Bird@edinburgh.ac.uk

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