>My thoughts exactly. Which is why I am against
>software patents and copyrights.
I'm not against copyrights, I'm only against the way copyrights are done today.
Our constitution says that Congress has the power:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
If a copyright does not promote the progress of science (or art), it should be rendered invalid. It's also intended to be a "limited time(s)", and in the computer industry, 5 years is an Epoch, not a limited time- they ought to expire after a couple of years.
>Are going to tell me that those institutions
>don't constitute coercion?
>Do you must believe
>that you have a natural right of ownership to
>the output of your brain's machinations?
I think that people ought to be credited with their own ideas, but again, after a period of time it should cease belonging solely to them.
The #1 barrier for any OS to supplant windows is the inertia of windows users... the fact that most programs that people use or want to use or will want to use exists for windows and not for linux.
Usability becomes a problem once you've made the decision to run the other OS'es... how can you recover from a problem? How can I change my settings? How do I make my computer go on the internet? etc. Recovering from problems... that depends on the problems. I ran into problems with windows that stymied everyone- why was my PC clock losing time so that in 3 hours, it gained only 5 minutes? (no it wasn't the battery- i never changed it and i dont have this problem now) Why did my computer always freeze after bootup- which program was loading that caused the problem?
OS/2 had better capabilities than windows 3.1 but ended up costing users a lot more money. The 32 disk swapping hassle (vs 6 for win31) was another factor- installation was a pain in the ass and slow.
Those PCs put together, however, invariably always use terrible chipsets, slow memory (PC133) and mediocre video. The onboard audio is probably sufficient but I don't know. They're sufficient, perhaps, to Joe Schmoe who doesn't use a computer very often except to check email and browse the web for an hour, and to open Microsoft Word. The Xbox, presumably, at least ships with a high(er) quality chipset- something that would jack the price up of these computers to at least $50 more than the Xbox, assuming that Video is on board.
I'd like the idea of a computer in my living room which is intended to pipe mp3s to my stereo (off CD or the HD or the network), pipe video to my TV, capture video from the TV like a VCR and play DVDs. The Xbox doesn't fit this bill right now completely but hacked, it'd be able to do all of it except for the PVR function (assuming that adding a USB based tv tuner isn't possible). Yes, there are computer that can do all of this right now, but how many of them resemble a consumer component, and are silent like one, instead of being as noisy as a desktop computer (and as obvious as one- I wan't something that doesn't look like a computer there.)
How does one equate the proposal of a national database comprised of information already available at the state level with allowing searches of a person and/or his property without a warrant?
Seriously, I do not see why the national ID card is so objectionable.
"Killing hundreds of thousands of innocent unsuspecting people, both through our actions, and our inaction. "
Through our inaction?
Lets look at Iraq, everyone's favorite posterboy for American policy killing thousands of innocents.
Back in 1991 when we were all set to drive them out of Kuwait, the anti-war gang wanted us to rely on, instead (drum roll)....
Economic sanctions.
The same economic sanctions that have been in effect, that have not deterred Hussein's push to acquire weapons of mass destruction, allow UN inspections of his facilities and the like. Now, the same people who wanted us to stick with economic sanctions are blaming those sanctions for the deaths of Iraqi children today.
Would "Economic Sanctions" have helped in Rwanda? They didn't seem to help in Yugoslavia, and in spite of our saving Bosnian Muslim lives, we're depicted as being Anti-Islam because we don't lean hard enough on Israel to make peace with terrorists in the PA.
1> A "Bad Thing" (tm)
2> A "Good Thing" (tm)
3> Supposed to help us fight terrorism
4> Supposed to work?
5> any different from State IDs?
6> any different from passports?
Regarding #5 I know what a passport is used for, but in terms of identification... what's the difference?
Pac bell is probably getting rid of some newsgroups that are clearly piracy groups (alt.binaries.warez, alt.binaries.cds.games, etc.) and these newsgroups are probably more of a drain on resources than anything else.
I wouldnt call that "filtering" but rather refusing to carry. Which they've got the right to do anyway.
As far as letting usenet die, that's wrong headed IMO. USENET is a more appropriate tool to have forums than the web, and there are still intelligent people on USENET. SPAM can be eliminated with kill filters, and even the Spammers seem to be subsiding in various newsgroups; unless you're looking for porn, I don't see spammers in talk.* or alt.sport.baseball*
That $500 PS2 setup is using a television for your video. I'm not sure anyone in their right might would want to use a "workstation" by connecting it to their tv- that might've been tolerable 12 years ago on an Amiga, but today with 19" monitors running for $300 or so?
Those are some expensive Mice/keyboards to run $80.
Plus, we're talking about a workstation, not a game box. So what's the need for a gamepad?
1> I can't use it with other email clients- i MUST connect to AOL to use it. (I can use netscape 6 but that's not much different than MS's hotmail stunt with OE.
2> Spam. Tons of spam. Tons of garbage and spam.
Which I get from hotmail as well also. And Yahoo. But it's not so bad on yahoo. It's dreadful on hotmail. And makes AOL unusable for me.
Of course I'm assuming you've not gone into the chat rooms on AOL. That tends to help slightly.
>And do you want the third world to be using
>closed-source proprietory binary-only software?
Uh did you think before you said this? There'd be no reason not use use open-source software on the Duron/Celeron boxes described previously. Playstations, unlike Celeron/Durons are proprietary hardware, and require specifically designed software; you can't just download the latest linux distro and run it on your playstation, unlike the Duron/Celeron box.
>And yet it still comes in as a whole system -
>new - for less than the cost of a decent
>graphics card for a PC.
Playstation 2s are $300. A $30 video card today is easily a _decent_ video card, so long as you don't demand the latest & greatest 3D capabilities. You can get excellent 3D for less than $200. Top of the line 3D will run you the cost of the playstation 2.
>Cost counts; sometimes a cheap sledgehammer is
>better than an expensive nutcracker.
Not if all you want is to crack nuts, and want to keep the table intact.
My take on "decent" video card is something that works reasonably well; any AGP card ought to qualify as "decent", as long as it has 4 megs of ram on board at a minimum. That drops the price down to the $30 level.
Usenet was designed as a forum, kinda like slashdot is, where people were able to discuss whatever issues piqued them. The difference between BBS forums (popular at the time) and USENET was merely the fact that one BBS reached only a specific city while USENET reached across the world.
"It is also quite possibilty the greatest resource for the personal sharing of knowledge in near real time with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people all over the world."
Not anymore.
Usenet's problem is the lack of moderation, which is good and bad. Lack of moderation means you can say whatever you want. But it also means that the noise to signal ratio is going to be higher than expected. With the advent of the web, and the ability of people to put up web sites to dissemenate info, plus webbased forums like/., the growth of instant messaging and so on have rendered USENET to irrelevance.
Usenet started in 1979. Did this predate BBSes? I don't know that USENET ever did much to foster a sence of community that BBSes didn't already do (and do a better job of IMO)
I use USENT and have done so since I first heard of the internet (back in 88) but to claim USENET is more important than IM, the WWW, FTP, etc.?
Usenet's popularity has been somewhat overblown, and has been largely irrelevant once AOL, Prodigy and Compuserve gained access. Once that happened, plus Canter & Siegel's SPAM, USENET has turned into a mess of trolls, spam and attempts to spread trojan horses/virii/worms/etc.
The reasoning is specious.
To prohibit _some_ newsgroups because violations of the DMCA may occur within them opens the door to removing _all_ of them because there's nothing telling me I can't post those binaries on talk.politics.misc.
It would be reasonable & more valid for them to pull these newsgroups because they are a drain on @home resources, or otherwise negatively affect the newsfeed for other newsgroups. But the instant that a movie is posted on alt.binaries.movies.* which does NOT violate the DMCA shows that this reasoning is not a good one.
The biggest obstacle regarding widespread adoption of 'broadband' vs. dialup is the cost. Most people are fine with the speeds of dialup for accessing the internet, although usually become very accostomed to the high speed that cable/dsl/etc. offers. I know 3 people who said "I don't need that kind of speed" who today would shudder to go back to dial up from cable. But lets face it. My cable bill is $90/month for 3 ips and no premium channel service; without @home, it'd be $35. Not many people can afford the $55 or so a month (plus extra $200 or so for initial set up charges) that is required for broadband access. And not everyone can justify these high costs.
I know, a 2nd phone line is ~20/month and so is dialup access, so you're looking at a price differential of $15. But that's assuming they have that 2nd phone line. Odds are that they do not. (we're talking about most people, not everyone.)
Based on what Gibson said in his article, part of the problem is the fact that this dude Wicked was doing something pretty illegal, but there was no effort or intent to apprehend & punish him for these actions _unless_ significant amounts of cost was incurred, and such costs can be demonstrated.
So if he takes down your office server, sucks to be you, but if he attacks AT&T's web site, damned straight he's going to jail. That's pretty bogus.
Thats a good point, but truth is, we will not know the answer for some time.
We're also forgetting that Sony doesn't have the sort of reputation for CD-RW/R drives that Plextor has. For this type of media to catch on, other drive makers would need to build drives able to write (I'm assuming reading isn't an issue) the new media type.
I'm currently considering a new cd-rw, and would have no problems replacing my 4416 with a 121032 drive today, considering I can get one for $150. A sony DDCD for about 200-250 sounds like a great deal for me, considering I use the CD burner primarily when I download mp3s.
(That reminds me, if audio cds were burned in this manner, or those mp3 cds, wouldn't current players need to be "updated" to accomodate the new format?)
>I believe you never got experienced with the WPS
>interface. You were just coming from Windoze
>3.11 and that's it.
My experience was actually from Workbench; the computer I owned before my 486 was an Amiga 1200. My exposure to windows 3.1 was limited and I loathed every aspect of it. That IBM ported their PM replacement to windows helped make windows 3.1 useful but not enough to supplant use of os/2 for me.
>At first I didn't get the working principles of
>the WPS, too. Today I really love that
>interface. I can do whatever I want as fast as
>possible. Under W95/98 I have to work another
>way, which I believe is not good.
I found the win95 way made more sense, and the win98/Ie5 stuff has improved it for me; the quicklaunch bar is most useful for me & alternatives have not been as useful IMO.
>I love the changing of icons by drag&drop. I
>love sending netscape to a URL by simply
>dropping it onto it.
That requires having a URL defined as an icon somewhere, and to me is more clumsy than merely typing the URL or storing it into favorites & opening it up that way.
>Looking around at all the biased, uninformed, >ignorant posts reminds me why FUD is such a good >marketing tool.
As opposed to whatever the opposite of FUD is... excessively high expectations. It's what the pro-MS crowd has been chiming in about windows 9X, windows NT, 2k, XP and so on ever since everyone was still dealing with Dos and Win 3.X and annoyances like cd-roms that fail 50% of the time to work properly in Dos and windows, or sound cards that didn't work with your game unless you used the older soundblaster emulation of your card. And the OS/2 folks were just as guilty. Example:
>How many of you that just bashed Os/2 have ever >ran it? For more then a day, and before it quote >unquote died?
I have used os/2 warp for a year on a 486/33
computer. I started off with 4 megs of ram, eventually upgraded to 12. More stable and useable than windows 3.1 was, but then, win3.1 apps worked in os/2 for the most part and few of them were any good IMO. It wasn't until I installed win 95 when I realized there was nothing I could do in OS/2 that I could not also do in windows 95. And do so better.
And the funny thing is, every answer to my "why is os/2 crashing on me" was retorted with a "cheap/bad hardware" remark, or something similar. As if in order to get os/2 to work properly I had to buy a $4000 computer to get it to work properly.
>How many are baseing your opinion on other FUD? >Have any of you ran a BBS and wheren't running >Os/2 or Linux?
I never ran a BBS. I did use IBM's mediocre web browser, however. And the various, lame os/2 irc clients that were easily outdone by mirc. For most of my time in os/2, if I irc'ed I did so by telnetting into a shell. About the only app that os/2 had which was superior to anything in windows was ZOC. Not much of a surprise to learn that ZOC was ported to windows about a year or 2 after I abandoned os/2.
>How often could you surf the web, play quake 1,
Surf the web. Yeah great. With a shitty web browser (Netscape didn't exist for os/2 until 97 at the earliest).
> and have 2 nodes with users actively doing >things without a slow down? On a NON-pentium
On a 486/33? Hahahahaha Yeah sure. On a 486/100/133? Maybe. With 64 megs of ram. 32 perhaps. 16, no way.
>computer? Ohh that's right you never could.
>I'm not trying to flame here, but I'm tired of >people spreading FUD. Not just about Os/2, but >Linux, Windows, Mac's, anything that they >haven't experienced first hand but they still >shoot their mouths off because "everyone else" >says so.
>Looking around at all the biased, uninformed,
>ignorant posts reminds me why FUD is such a good
>marketing tool.
As opposed to whatever the opposite of FUD is... excessively high expectations. It's what the pro-MS crowd has been chiming in about windows 9X, windows NT, 2k, XP and so on ever since everyone was still dealing with Dos and Win 3.X and annoyances like cd-roms that fail 50% of the time to work properly in Dos and windows, or sound cards that didn't work with your game unless you used the older soundblaster emulation of your card. And the OS/2 folks were just as guilty. Example:
>How many of you that just bashed Os/2 have ever
>ran it? For more then a day, and before it quote
>unquote died?
I have used os/2 warp for a year on a 486 computer. I started off with 4 megs of ram, eventually upgraded to 12. More stable and useable than windows 3.1 was, but then, win3.1 apps worked in os/2 for the most part and few of them were any good IMO. It wasn't until I installed win 95 when I realized there was nothing I could do in OS/2 that I could not also do in windows 95. And do so better.
>How many are baseing your opinion on other FUD?
>Have any of you ran a BBS and wheren't running
>Os/2 or Linux?
I never ran a BBS. I did use IBM's mediocre web browser, however. And the various, lame os/2 irc clients that were easily outdone by mirc. For most of my time in os/2, if I irc'ed I did so by telnetting into a shell. About the only app that os/2 had which was superior to anything in windows was ZOC. Not much of a surprise to learn that ZOC was ported to windows about a year or 2 after I abandoned os/2.
>How often could you surf the web, play quake 1,
Surf the web. Yeah great. With a shitty web browser (Netscape didn't exist for os/2 until 97 at the earliest).
> and have 2 nodes with users actively doing
>things without a slow down? On a NON-pentium
On a 486/33? Hahahahaha Yeah sure. On a 486/100/133? Maybe. With 64 megs of ram. 32 perhaps. 16, no way.
>computer? Ohh that's right you never could.
>I'm not trying to flame here, but I'm tired of
>people spreading FUD. Not just about Os/2, but
>Linux, Windows, Mac's, anything that they
>haven't experienced first hand but they still
>shoot their mouths off because "everyone else"
>says so.
Slashdot Mirror
>My thoughts exactly. Which is why I am against
>software patents and copyrights.
I'm not against copyrights, I'm only against the way copyrights are done today.
Our constitution says that Congress has the power:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
If a copyright does not promote the progress of science (or art), it should be rendered invalid. It's also intended to be a "limited time(s)", and in the computer industry, 5 years is an Epoch, not a limited time- they ought to expire after a couple of years.
>Are going to tell me that those institutions
>don't constitute coercion?
>Do you must believe
>that you have a natural right of ownership to
>the output of your brain's machinations?
I think that people ought to be credited with their own ideas, but again, after a period of time it should cease belonging solely to them.
You're backwards.
The #1 barrier for any OS to supplant windows is the inertia of windows users... the fact that most programs that people use or want to use or will want to use exists for windows and not for linux.
Usability becomes a problem once you've made the decision to run the other OS'es... how can you recover from a problem? How can I change my settings? How do I make my computer go on the internet? etc. Recovering from problems... that depends on the problems. I ran into problems with windows that stymied everyone- why was my PC clock losing time so that in 3 hours, it gained only 5 minutes? (no it wasn't the battery- i never changed it and i dont have this problem now) Why did my computer always freeze after bootup- which program was loading that caused the problem?
OS/2 had better capabilities than windows 3.1 but ended up costing users a lot more money. The 32 disk swapping hassle (vs 6 for win31) was another factor- installation was a pain in the ass and slow.
Those PCs put together, however, invariably always use terrible chipsets, slow memory (PC133) and mediocre video. The onboard audio is probably sufficient but I don't know. They're sufficient, perhaps, to Joe Schmoe who doesn't use a computer very often except to check email and browse the web for an hour, and to open Microsoft Word. The Xbox, presumably, at least ships with a high(er) quality chipset- something that would jack the price up of these computers to at least $50 more than the Xbox, assuming that Video is on board.
I'd like the idea of a computer in my living room which is intended to pipe mp3s to my stereo (off CD or the HD or the network), pipe video to my TV, capture video from the TV like a VCR and play DVDs. The Xbox doesn't fit this bill right now completely but hacked, it'd be able to do all of it except for the PVR function (assuming that adding a USB based tv tuner isn't possible). Yes, there are computer that can do all of this right now, but how many of them resemble a consumer component, and are silent like one, instead of being as noisy as a desktop computer (and as obvious as one- I wan't something that doesn't look like a computer there.)
How does one equate the proposal of a national database comprised of information already available at the state level with allowing searches of a person and/or his property without a warrant?
Seriously, I do not see why the national ID card is so objectionable.
I also do not see how it would help either.
"Killing hundreds of thousands of innocent unsuspecting people, both through our actions, and our inaction. "
....
Through our inaction?
Lets look at Iraq, everyone's favorite posterboy for American policy killing thousands of innocents.
Back in 1991 when we were all set to drive them out of Kuwait, the anti-war gang wanted us to rely on, instead (drum roll)
Economic sanctions.
The same economic sanctions that have been in effect, that have not deterred Hussein's push to acquire weapons of mass destruction, allow UN inspections of his facilities and the like. Now, the same people who wanted us to stick with economic sanctions are blaming those sanctions for the deaths of Iraqi children today.
Would "Economic Sanctions" have helped in Rwanda? They didn't seem to help in Yugoslavia, and in spite of our saving Bosnian Muslim lives, we're depicted as being Anti-Islam because we don't lean hard enough on Israel to make peace with terrorists in the PA.
1> A "Bad Thing" (tm)
2> A "Good Thing" (tm)
3> Supposed to help us fight terrorism
4> Supposed to work?
5> any different from State IDs?
6> any different from passports?
Regarding #5 I know what a passport is used for, but in terms of identification... what's the difference?
"yes".
Or is it "censorship" when a R&B station decides NOT to put Rage Against the Machine songs on the air?
Pac bell is probably getting rid of some newsgroups that are clearly piracy groups (alt.binaries.warez, alt.binaries.cds.games, etc.) and these newsgroups are probably more of a drain on resources than anything else.
I wouldnt call that "filtering" but rather refusing to carry. Which they've got the right to do anyway.
As far as letting usenet die, that's wrong headed IMO. USENET is a more appropriate tool to have forums than the web, and there are still intelligent people on USENET. SPAM can be eliminated with kill filters, and even the Spammers seem to be subsiding in various newsgroups; unless you're looking for porn, I don't see spammers in talk.* or alt.sport.baseball*
That $500 PS2 setup is using a television for your video. I'm not sure anyone in their right might would want to use a "workstation" by connecting it to their tv- that might've been tolerable 12 years ago on an Amiga, but today with 19" monitors running for $300 or so?
Those are some expensive Mice/keyboards to run $80.
Plus, we're talking about a workstation, not a game box. So what's the need for a gamepad?
You misspelled "Outlook" as "the Internet" Then again, before the internet there were BBSes which were pretty handy too in spreading virii.
My only complaint about AOL's email is:
1> I can't use it with other email clients- i MUST connect to AOL to use it. (I can use netscape 6 but that's not much different than MS's hotmail stunt with OE.
2> Spam. Tons of spam. Tons of garbage and spam.
Which I get from hotmail as well also. And Yahoo. But it's not so bad on yahoo. It's dreadful on hotmail. And makes AOL unusable for me.
Of course I'm assuming you've not gone into the chat rooms on AOL. That tends to help slightly.
>>it runs x86 software
It being the Celeron 400 or Duron box
>And do you want the third world to be using
>closed-source proprietory binary-only software?
Uh did you think before you said this? There'd be no reason not use use open-source software on the Duron/Celeron boxes described previously. Playstations, unlike Celeron/Durons are proprietary hardware, and require specifically designed software; you can't just download the latest linux distro and run it on your playstation, unlike the Duron/Celeron box.
>And yet it still comes in as a whole system -
>new - for less than the cost of a decent
>graphics card for a PC.
Playstation 2s are $300. A $30 video card today is easily a _decent_ video card, so long as you don't demand the latest & greatest 3D capabilities. You can get excellent 3D for less than $200. Top of the line 3D will run you the cost of the playstation 2.
>Cost counts; sometimes a cheap sledgehammer is
>better than an expensive nutcracker.
Not if all you want is to crack nuts, and want to keep the table intact.
My take on "decent" video card is something that works reasonably well; any AGP card ought to qualify as "decent", as long as it has 4 megs of ram on board at a minimum. That drops the price down to the $30 level.
Usenet was designed as a forum, kinda like slashdot is, where people were able to discuss whatever issues piqued them. The difference between BBS forums (popular at the time) and USENET was merely the fact that one BBS reached only a specific city while USENET reached across the world.
/., the growth of instant messaging and so on have rendered USENET to irrelevance.
"It is also quite possibilty the greatest resource for the personal sharing of knowledge in near real time with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people all over the world."
Not anymore.
Usenet's problem is the lack of moderation, which is good and bad. Lack of moderation means you can say whatever you want. But it also means that the noise to signal ratio is going to be higher than expected. With the advent of the web, and the ability of people to put up web sites to dissemenate info, plus webbased forums like
Usenet started in 1979. Did this predate BBSes? I don't know that USENET ever did much to foster a sence of community that BBSes didn't already do (and do a better job of IMO)
I use USENT and have done so since I first heard of the internet (back in 88) but to claim USENET is more important than IM, the WWW, FTP, etc.?
Usenet's popularity has been somewhat overblown, and has been largely irrelevant once AOL, Prodigy and Compuserve gained access. Once that happened, plus Canter & Siegel's SPAM, USENET has turned into a mess of trolls, spam and attempts to spread trojan horses/virii/worms/etc.
Here's a clue.
The Clinton administration did the same thing when the Bush administration left.
I have 2 proposals.
1> Get an AOL account and go into the people connection for 5 minutes.
2> Get a different AOL account and _don't_ go into PC.
3> Get a hotmail account.
Lets see how much spam you get within a week of being online & what kind of spam you get.
The reasoning is specious. To prohibit _some_ newsgroups because violations of the DMCA may occur within them opens the door to removing _all_ of them because there's nothing telling me I can't post those binaries on talk.politics.misc. It would be reasonable & more valid for them to pull these newsgroups because they are a drain on @home resources, or otherwise negatively affect the newsfeed for other newsgroups. But the instant that a movie is posted on alt.binaries.movies.* which does NOT violate the DMCA shows that this reasoning is not a good one.
The biggest obstacle regarding widespread adoption of 'broadband' vs. dialup is the cost. Most people are fine with the speeds of dialup for accessing the internet, although usually become very accostomed to the high speed that cable/dsl/etc. offers. I know 3 people who said "I don't need that kind of speed" who today would shudder to go back to dial up from cable. But lets face it. My cable bill is $90/month for 3 ips and no premium channel service; without @home, it'd be $35. Not many people can afford the $55 or so a month (plus extra $200 or so for initial set up charges) that is required for broadband access. And not everyone can justify these high costs. I know, a 2nd phone line is ~20/month and so is dialup access, so you're looking at a price differential of $15. But that's assuming they have that 2nd phone line. Odds are that they do not. (we're talking about most people, not everyone.)
Based on what Gibson said in his article, part of the problem is the fact that this dude Wicked was doing something pretty illegal, but there was no effort or intent to apprehend & punish him for these actions _unless_ significant amounts of cost was incurred, and such costs can be demonstrated.
So if he takes down your office server, sucks to be you, but if he attacks AT&T's web site, damned straight he's going to jail. That's pretty bogus.
Thats a good point, but truth is, we will not know the answer for some time.
We're also forgetting that Sony doesn't have the sort of reputation for CD-RW/R drives that Plextor has. For this type of media to catch on, other drive makers would need to build drives able to write (I'm assuming reading isn't an issue) the new media type.
I'm currently considering a new cd-rw, and would have no problems replacing my 4416 with a 121032 drive today, considering I can get one for $150. A sony DDCD for about 200-250 sounds like a great deal for me, considering I use the CD burner primarily when I download mp3s.
(That reminds me, if audio cds were burned in this manner, or those mp3 cds, wouldn't current players need to be "updated" to accomodate the new format?)
>I believe you never got experienced with the WPS
>interface. You were just coming from Windoze
>3.11 and that's it.
My experience was actually from Workbench; the computer I owned before my 486 was an Amiga 1200. My exposure to windows 3.1 was limited and I loathed every aspect of it. That IBM ported their PM replacement to windows helped make windows 3.1 useful but not enough to supplant use of os/2 for me.
>At first I didn't get the working principles of
>the WPS, too. Today I really love that
>interface. I can do whatever I want as fast as
>possible. Under W95/98 I have to work another
>way, which I believe is not good.
I found the win95 way made more sense, and the win98/Ie5 stuff has improved it for me; the quicklaunch bar is most useful for me & alternatives have not been as useful IMO.
>I love the changing of icons by drag&drop. I
>love sending netscape to a URL by simply
>dropping it onto it.
That requires having a URL defined as an icon somewhere, and to me is more clumsy than merely typing the URL or storing it into favorites & opening it up that way.
Crap I fucked up the last one...
>Looking around at all the biased, uninformed, >ignorant posts reminds me why FUD is such a good >marketing tool.
As opposed to whatever the opposite of FUD is... excessively high expectations. It's what the pro-MS crowd has been chiming in about windows 9X, windows NT, 2k, XP and so on ever since everyone was still dealing with Dos and Win 3.X and annoyances like cd-roms that fail 50% of the time to work properly in Dos and windows, or sound cards that didn't work with your game unless you used the older soundblaster emulation of your card. And the OS/2 folks were just as guilty. Example:
>How many of you that just bashed Os/2 have ever >ran it? For more then a day, and before it quote >unquote died?
I have used os/2 warp for a year on a 486/33
computer. I started off with 4 megs of ram, eventually upgraded to 12. More stable and useable than windows 3.1 was, but then, win3.1 apps worked in os/2 for the most part and few of them were any good IMO. It wasn't until I installed win 95 when I realized there was nothing I could do in OS/2 that I could not also do in windows 95. And do so better.
And the funny thing is, every answer to my "why is os/2 crashing on me" was retorted with a "cheap/bad hardware" remark, or something similar. As if in order to get os/2 to work properly I had to buy a $4000 computer to get it to work properly.
>How many are baseing your opinion on other FUD? >Have any of you ran a BBS and wheren't running >Os/2 or Linux?
I never ran a BBS. I did use IBM's mediocre web browser, however. And the various, lame os/2 irc clients that were easily outdone by mirc. For most of my time in os/2, if I irc'ed I did so by telnetting into a shell. About the only app that os/2 had which was superior to anything in windows was ZOC. Not much of a surprise to learn that ZOC was ported to windows about a year or 2 after I abandoned os/2.
>How often could you surf the web, play quake 1,
Surf the web. Yeah great. With a shitty web browser (Netscape didn't exist for os/2 until 97 at the earliest).
> and have 2 nodes with users actively doing >things without a slow down? On a NON-pentium
On a 486/33? Hahahahaha Yeah sure. On a 486/100/133? Maybe. With 64 megs of ram. 32 perhaps. 16, no way.
>computer? Ohh that's right you never could.
>I'm not trying to flame here, but I'm tired of >people spreading FUD. Not just about Os/2, but >Linux, Windows, Mac's, anything that they >haven't experienced first hand but they still >shoot their mouths off because "everyone else" >says so.
>Looking around at all the biased, uninformed, >ignorant posts reminds me why FUD is such a good >marketing tool. As opposed to whatever the opposite of FUD is... excessively high expectations. It's what the pro-MS crowd has been chiming in about windows 9X, windows NT, 2k, XP and so on ever since everyone was still dealing with Dos and Win 3.X and annoyances like cd-roms that fail 50% of the time to work properly in Dos and windows, or sound cards that didn't work with your game unless you used the older soundblaster emulation of your card. And the OS/2 folks were just as guilty. Example: >How many of you that just bashed Os/2 have ever >ran it? For more then a day, and before it quote >unquote died? I have used os/2 warp for a year on a 486 computer. I started off with 4 megs of ram, eventually upgraded to 12. More stable and useable than windows 3.1 was, but then, win3.1 apps worked in os/2 for the most part and few of them were any good IMO. It wasn't until I installed win 95 when I realized there was nothing I could do in OS/2 that I could not also do in windows 95. And do so better. >How many are baseing your opinion on other FUD? >Have any of you ran a BBS and wheren't running >Os/2 or Linux? I never ran a BBS. I did use IBM's mediocre web browser, however. And the various, lame os/2 irc clients that were easily outdone by mirc. For most of my time in os/2, if I irc'ed I did so by telnetting into a shell. About the only app that os/2 had which was superior to anything in windows was ZOC. Not much of a surprise to learn that ZOC was ported to windows about a year or 2 after I abandoned os/2. >How often could you surf the web, play quake 1, Surf the web. Yeah great. With a shitty web browser (Netscape didn't exist for os/2 until 97 at the earliest). > and have 2 nodes with users actively doing >things without a slow down? On a NON-pentium On a 486/33? Hahahahaha Yeah sure. On a 486/100/133? Maybe. With 64 megs of ram. 32 perhaps. 16, no way. >computer? Ohh that's right you never could. >I'm not trying to flame here, but I'm tired of >people spreading FUD. Not just about Os/2, but >Linux, Windows, Mac's, anything that they >haven't experienced first hand but they still >shoot their mouths off because "everyone else" >says so.
btw let me clarify. We use office 97 on nt 4.0 boxes. I know the word 95/97 file format was for all versions, not limited to NT versions of word.