Tree and Ken are reluctant to migrate their software to W95, and both have
volunteered compelling explanations ? in particular the difficulties in
supporting two wholly-different versions of the same product and finding a
solution to the Win/CW timing nightmare.
IMHO there are other reasons why we should hold off lobbying for W95
contest software for a while. If there's a mass migration to
computer-controlled rigs like the Kachina and Patcomm then the current
generation of contest logger won't be much use, and neither would a
straight W95 "porting" of CT, NA or TR. Any kind of full-featured contest
software for these rigs and their successors would likely have to be
tailored for the specific machine.
If we decide to stay with our "Tokyo-by-night" stand-alone rigs, we then
need to consider what kind of computer to use with them. Will we still want
to tie up and cart around these expensive, grinding, leviathan PCs (see the
recent "How to carry a CRT monitor on an aircraft" strand) with their
bloated O/Ss? Or would we prefer to be able to pick and choose from a
selection of cheap PalmPCs, smaller notebooks and desktop machines all
running the same (platform-independent) JAVA or COBRA contest logger?
Switching to W95 contest loggers right now would be a lot of effort (for
the authors) for little more than a cosmetic change (for the users). The
big changes will be dictated by the new rigs and computers we buy ? let's
discuss our approach to those instead.
73
Al, GM4BAP
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