| To: Jerry Whlan who wrote (1552) | 4/13/2001 3:28:17 AM |
| From: E. Charters | Respond to of 1793 |
| |
Seems like a nice bunch of people. (MS pioneers) I don't think any of then are truly evil. Of course any fool could tell that MSDOS sucked. It was and is a curious mass of contra dictions. It was easy to crash and use. Remember how many bugs it had and how slow it was? Old, bad technology and the more they got into it and upgraded the more tangled up and bad it got. The installed base thing. The ISA legacy. Bad cards, bad programming, anemic tools and high costs. Amiga was twice the operating system the minute it was born but it too was crippled by poor thinking.
Now Winbloat is bigger and badder than ever. On a 1 GHz computer it is like a modern slick Frankenstein on drugs. Microsloth is in bad trouble. Bad trouble.
I spent 15,000 on MSDOS-windows and their bad software. (what was I thinking?) In their defense however let me say that they tried valiantly to write it foolproof for idiots. And they had to write it to run good on an elaborately backwardly compatible skein of tragically broken protocols. Of course when you do that it may lack some high end features that an intelligent user would like to see. I finally snapped when I bought a 700 dollar compiler for basic. I get it and it is some slick. It has database features to die for. Seened slick complete and fast. Wow. (Where did they buy this I thought?) So it will not work over a network. No gui capabilities. Scratch enterprise commercial programming. Oh well. Out comes VB. I phone. What is the upgrade cost? No upgrade. 6 months later they tell me there is no more support for the product I bought. Buy VB is the message. I buy VB Pro. 400 dollars. It will not do real commercial programming either. Nice to start but it is a toy too. You have to get the enterprise edition (700 dollars more). And some sorts you can do by hand faster. And to truly get good salable stuff you had to buy 5,000 worth of add-ons. The ominous street talk. That won't do it either. The stuff is broken. Gotta go machine language or do it in C.
So is Linux the perfect replacement? Hardly. But considering that it is a pure amateur effort and patched together by some kids at home in their spare time, it is amazing what it will do. I cannot imagine running a server as I do in Windows or some other Unix. I just could not have got the reliability and capability at twenty times the price. Sure it was hard to do and took some hair pulling and some time. (And I AM a raving Genius too. Imagine how hard this would have been for an ordinary person!) But to do it with a Sun would have cost me 20,000 including hardware and it would be nowhere near as good. I think it cost about 2000 with hardware and software. We won't talk about time. A few weekends. Maybe more :)
Sun got so sweaty about Linux that they bought Star Office to kill off that edge that (?) may have got. Then they bought Cobalt. They is scared no doubt. (Remember that it was Excel that built Microsoft more than any other program. OK, Word helped a bit.) I can see the developers being tempted by the shares. But it was a mistake. Let's not let that happen again. I can really see the Apache people's wisdom now.
Sun's days are numbered and they know it. I can see McNeally waking up nites and wondering how long he will have his job.
I cannot see for the life of me why someone would buy a SUN with its trop cher OS when they can slap Linux on a 600 dollar PC and do more better and faster for a tiny fraction of the cost. Soon thousands of their customers will awaken. there is only so long their MIS, IT and corporate BOZOS will stay suspending disbelief. Sorry guys. I know you are not that stupid. I know how I clung to my belief in Santa Claus way past when I should have known better. It was comfortable to stay in that dream. And I am sure Scott is a helluva nice guy and smart as whip too. But he should not be allowed to buy software. Well OK, but he has to develop and use it and sell it to the masses cheaply. Well Ok, I guess he can do what he wants but we don't have to buy anything from him do we?
Where will WME lead. hmmmm.... I dunno. I hate to trash just to trash. I want to be apolitical about this. If you want to use Windows by all means you go girl. But realistically? ME is not it. NT is not it. The dyke has cracked. The leak is slow but sure. Soon only old toothless people will be left drinking windows beer.
I know some people will shake their heads and say "do you honestly think that thousands of average people are going to learn how to use UNIX? har ti har har har har!" Well, yeah I guess they have a point. 1500 complex commands and Xcrash86 is a tad much, KDE and GNOME notwithstanding. And some of the propellor head's idea of usable everyman's GUI applications are enough to make the Pope say shee-it ten times softly, so I realize the alternative is not screaming IT'S ALL OVER, MICROSOFT.
But I cannot see it being anyone's easy ride to monopolize the enterprise, the consumer, the small business, the appliance market, the server market, embedded thingies, wireless etc..
What characterized the triumph of man and the mammals was I think Adaptability. That was it. Light fast on their feet, omnivorous, good in any environment not too highly specialized. They evolved to meet changing demands of a harsh and forbidding new frontier. Morphing was in. Tar Pits were out. The intelligent interface could bend and flow. It was cheap, it did not need much to survice and could migrate to find food. etc. etc.. you get the picture.
So what system is hands down capable of surviving all the changes? Is independent and supported by it user base alone? I could say it is Linux or something very like it.
Let's say it becomes illegal or impractical tomorrow to use the x86 processor or the MAC and Red Hat, Suse and Caldera all go out of business. Where do we stand? I can adapt in perhaps one day. Back in business. Very little loss of functionality if any. Where would MS and its user be? sheesh.. what a bunch of crybabies they would become. Propellor heads would be offering themselves as guide dogs to the MS blind.
What is the WWW breaks down and is unusable. The IP structure still exists but we cannot use Netscape or IE. Who would be back on their feet in weeks or days? Are we tied by the way to the WWW or is there a better or many alternatives in this club? Thimk. Use your propellors.
It takes a while for the penny to drop. When it does it rings like a bell. I remember discussing with some people about using other people's computers to handle messages on a world wide net. This was many years ago. (33) I didn't like it. Still don't. And they talked about hypertext like indexing. Ok for some things but I wasn't sure about that either. No organization there. How do you find anything or anybody?.. this was VERY long ago. This whole thing was planned you realize. It did not just happen. And yes, Virginia, I am very sure they can get inside anyone's computer. Security is only for THEM Not us. (A fundamental mistake. If most people are insecure to them then all are insecure if THEY are not. Hansonn gave away YOUR secrets not just theirs!)
It takes really smart people to write code. They are all co-opted. Ok Stallman thinks he is not. Or we think he thinks he is not. Of course some are recalcitrant rebels. They make sure people like me don't get any money as they know for sure I am loose cannon and will make some rube goldberg system that will foil their plan to be BIG brother to everyone, so the world does not go to hell in hand basket.
They are right about that. And I know that they have chased away all kinds of money. They saw me coming. If I had my way I would write an actual secure PKey system so NO one could crackread it. (They keep hinting they can read PGP and even more secure code stuff. are they foolin?) Even with key sniffers. They know I would do it because I hate their effin control and attitude and they just won't let me. They got their ways. In a way Mitnick is a hero. Some day in some land that is truly free there will be statue to him. Come to think of it, he was probably working for the feds. Scratch the statue, to be truly free you must be paranoid.
Would the world go to hell with this dangerous munition at large? hmmmm.. you know I don't care if it does. As long as I am the boss in hell and can order out for ice cubes I really don't care.
And finally, while we are on the subject, let's figure out this Spam vs anonymous email thing. anon email good spam bad. But on the pretense of eliminating spam the evil ones have seemingly simul-banned anon email. Was we asleep? Spam is one million people sending one million emails a day for no apparent reason. (It would never happen, I think it would peak at about 200 a day in your inbox... it is so much easier to filter than send, and eventually they senders would all be hunted down and killed) But paranoia says no it would maximize at one trillion emails from everyone at once..
Anon email is one person tipping off a neighbour that his garbage is being raided by a glue sniffing racoon. You can understand guarding one's identity in case like that. Perhaps co-opted scientologist don't like that but hey! how was we to know that the racoon was clear and had access to secrets of the religion?
How did the two get mixed up? Surely there is a way to prevent mail flood without killing the pretense of net anonymity! |
