For someone to be able to say that any given piece of software, but particularly Netscape, is more buggy than something from Microsoft is truly embarassing, wouldn't you say? *grin*
"You have to look to the fringes to see where the center is going." - Stewart Brand I personally hope GNU/Linux/Open Source never goes entirely mainstream. Most of the computer using public have pretty mundane interests. "Classic UFO's... crafts for kids..." Interpretations from hell.com
Rest assured...you're completely safe. The Linux community in general would have to undergo a truly mammoth attitude adjustment for Linux to go completely mainstream, IMHO. I'm yet another Windows user who has been turned off Linux...Mainly simply because the people who advocate the operating system are a pack of mindless bigots. Yes it is technically superior, but in my observation UNIX in general tends to turn people into opinionated, elitist assholes. I don't want to become an asshole, so I'm not going to use it.;-) I'm also not an incredibly lame hacker wannabe, and I don't have any desire to become one of those, either. Rather than promoting true individuality, UNIX users and Linux users specifically have a tendency to have the attitude that if everyone isn't doing things exactly their way, then they are obviously mentally deficient. Fine, but in a choice between your way or the highway, I'm going to hit the road.;)
IMHO the key to originality isn't so much coming up with completely new concepts...that only happens once every few thousand years. To me, you can still be perfectly original by taking a large number of old ideas, and arranging them in new combinations. And from that point of view to my mind, the Matrix was moderately original. None of the individual concepts were original...They never are. You're only going to hear a new piece of music...you're never going to hear new notes.:)
I've been reading a number of the comments posted under this article about a what a pack of howling bigots Christians supposedly are, and I'd like to take this opportunity to point the finger back at this site's readership. I realise what I'm about to say isn't likely to improve my credibility around here, but I feel it needs to be said anywayz.
I feel that the majority of the readership of this site are considerably less than objective about a number of issues themselves. Moderation on Linux related issues in particular is a big indicator of what I mean here...The site is exclusively pro-Linux. If you make comments along the lines of "Linux is good, Linux is wonderful, everyone go out and buy Linux, etc etc," sit back and watch how far your comment will get moderated up. In the same spirit, woe betide you if you just happen to be a Windows user. Another thing that really bugs the hell out of me is how Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond get practically worshipped as deities...They're not deities...They're human beings, and in the case of Raymond in particular, they're not even human beings who write necessarily intelligent material 100% of the time. Yes Raymond has had some intelligent ideas, but if you go to his site you'll also find the writings of someone who is an egotistical smartass a lot of the time. Stallman is someone who comes across to me as being a lot more impressive, sure...but I still don't find myself worshipping the man. The Slashdot group ARE bigots in just as great a sense as any Christians you'll find are likely to be. They have a polytheistic religion, complete with it's own gods, it's own ministers, and it's own heroes...and anyone who isn't willing to convert is routinely verbally burned at the stake. The religion is called Linux.
The reason why more Christians don't point out how whacked the radical right is, is that most of them support it. A large number of (at least conservative) Christians are of the opinion that a facist system where most anything they didn't agree with got censored, would be a Good Thing. Unfortunately what they don't realise is that if you have social problems, pushing them underground by criminalising them usually only makes them worse, because it makes them harder to police.
With regards to the idea that "portals suck," yes, a lot of portals do suck. However, I am of the opinion that putting together a good portal is like anything else...You have to use your brain, you have to be doing it for the right reasons, and you have to be willing to keep pushing the envelope. The reason why a lot of portals have been lame is because the people who code them often aren't willing to take this approach.
The right portal formula, IMHO?
1. First and foremost, you have to take customisation/personalisation to the max. As someone else said in another message, your crucial objective is to give busy users the information they need quickly, and eliminating the noise that they don't. So have passworded individual accounts on the site, the way they do on this one, and customise, customise, customise! If you can do this correctly, you'll be providing an invaluable service to a lot of people...It doesn't have to have much to do with making a buck.
2. The banner issue:- This isn't about being money grubbing and commercialistic, but as I'm sure Commander Taco could tell you, running a popular web site costs money...and sometimes lots of it, hence his acquisition by Andover. Do the banner thing intelligently...Set up perl scripts which are able to match particular banners to people who'll be interested in them, based on account profiles...but if you do it that way, not only are people likely to not see your banners as intrusive and click on them, but who knows? If you have business users, and you're showing banner ads for business suppliers or courses, you may really be helping the user out by connecting him to that information.
3. The Web-based email issue:- Yes, there are some web based email services which really do blow goats, (Hotmail is the main one which immediately comes to mind) and yes maybe they are inherently not as secure as straight POP3, however I would argue that Joe Average User isn't going to really need absolutely bulletproof security anywayz. You put in all the standard disclaimers about not including credit card numbers in emails...and if you're really worried about it, maybe you could try and rig up pgp support somehow.
4. Spiders VS Directories:- Of course a spider is going to be tons better than a directory. A spider updates itself, whereas with a directory like Yahoo the user has to submit a site manually...and if your portal is popular, you then have to employ a batallion of auditors to go through all of the submissions. Try getting a submission on Yahoo within a week or two, and I'll be surprised if you succeed unless you're someone extremely important. Try getting a site on AltaVista, and if you've got your Meta tags and possibly a ROBOTS.TXT written correctly, it'll be there within 72 hours in many cases. My suggestion is that if you're thinking of putting a portal up yourself, don't even think about trying to run your own directory...Take advantage of other people who have good spider technology, but maybe a sucky portal by linking to them with one of the affiliate programs that many of them run. Use your head, and your users will thank you, the people who run the spider will thank you if they like getting exposure, and you might even (horrors!;) make a few bucks on the side.
I think that about covers most of the issues that people here seem to have grizzles with. And as I said, if you don't like the existing portals, put one together yourself! I'm in the process of doing it, and it really isn't all that difficult.
People can say portals suck, and maybe in 90% or so of cases they're right, because the faceless corps who run them *are* only interested in making money. But done correctly, I believe a good portal can be an invaluable service to everyone involved. A portal is like anything else...you do a bad portal, and it'll suck...you do a good portal, and it won't.
Slashdot itself, while not a portal par se, is I believe a good example of what I'm talking about. The customisation (the most important element of a portal, IMHO) is done cluefully, and the article system works well. It's a shame that some of it's readers aren't perhaps just a little more broad minded, but hey, you can't have everything. *grin*
Buying a packaged computer from one of these big companies has IMHO always been a stupid thing to do. For starters, they've always been the main distribution channel for Microsoft...You only have to pay Bill's famous operating system tax if you buy a machine from one of these companies.
For another thing, I've never known anyone who's bought a packaged machine who hasn't received faulty hardware in along with it. I got my first machine second hand in 1994...Since then I've been patching it with parts as I've needed to, and only recently bought and entirely new case and keyboard. With the exception of the original motherboard (which was due to bad wiring in this house anywayz) I've never had a problem with hardware. Not so for other people I've known who've bought packages. Bad hard drives, bad monitors etc...They've had to take them back to the company several times in some cases.
My third gripe with the big companies is that they rip people off. Back in 94 when I got my first 486 I got it for $2100 AUD. That was a 419 Mb hard drive, monitor, keyboard, 8 Mb of old DRAM, a Trident 1 Mb video card (good at the time), and an ESS 688 sound card, not to mention the loads of warez that was preinstalled on the hard drive. *grin* I wouldn't have seen a machine at that time like that for less than probably $2500 AUD, and my recent upgrade to a Celeron 400 with 64 Mb of SDRAM, a new case, a Voodoo Banshee 16 Mb video card, 13 Gb hard drive cost me and PS/2 keyboard cost $960 as I already had a monitor, mouse, soundcard and 33.6k modem. I wouldn't have seen a recent package with the stuff I got when I upgraded for less than $1200, and in most cases I'd have paid a heap more for the hard drive in particular, so I saved at least $300.
The moral of the story is that if you want to buy a reliable, cheap PC and you don't want to have to be dictated to by the likes of Microsoft and others, then companies like Compaq, Dell, Gateway and so on are absolutely for the birds. They give you nothing you do need, and everything you don't.
It's true...Womens' dedicated sites ARE stupid. From what I see on the net, most of this Webgrrrls and women specific site stuff is put up by lesbians and other mysandronistic scrags anywayz, not anybody who you'd really classify as actual women. More like guys born in womens' bodies who are extremely resentful of that fact.;-)
They might make a more UNIX friendly version of Windows, but don't hold your breath waiting for the ressurection of Xenix. It won't happen. Something about the Microsoft philosophy that you must understand is that they believe that they are inherently the best, and they believe this in such a way that it completely defies logic. I remember reading somewhere online before IE 4 was released how some young snot from MS was bragging on about how much better it was going to be than Netscape. When the person who was talking to him asked him how it would be in terms of specific features, the guy took on a very smug, self-satisfied air and said, "It will simply be better." Microsoft have exactly the same attitude about Windows. "It's the best cos it's the best cos it's the best cos it's the best." The idea that any other OS could be superior is completely incomprehensible to virtually the entire Microsoft mindset...So it won't impinge on their consciousness.
I'd be very interested in seeing this happen myself, but a couple of hurdles come to mind, in terms of a distributed, mass-usage scenario or true "virtual world", populated by people and not just bots... 1. Bandwidth:- Until broadband becomes common, and I mean really common, you can probably forget about seeing wide area networked, mainstream VR any time soon. Universities could possibly handle it...a cousin of mine goes to Monash and has access to speed of around 300k/sec...which to me seems pretty fast, but even that could be slow if you have a LOT of people on it and your graphics are really high detail. 2. Hardware:- 3Dfx graphics in particular take a lot of grunt, not to mention keeping track of where everyone is and what they're doing in a largely populated, multiplayer scenario. I'd be interested to see what someone could do with a reasonable sized network of high speed Xeons or SGI machines in this area, but I wouldn't bother with anything less processor wise, if you're talking about a true *world* of large size and with a lot of people. (50-100 or more at a minimum)
One thing I will say, and that is that the site's opening sequence on my modem (33.6) looked like a slide show gone wrong. If the guy who designed the site is as much a professional as the blurb says he is, then you'd think he'd know that one of the golden rules with DHTML is surely to cache/download ALL of your pictures/elements *first*, and THEN animate them...not animate them while the person's modem is still trying to download them at the same time.
So what is a hacker, after all? Eric Raymond offers this definition in the third edition of his New Hacker's Dictionary: ''A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.''
If this is actually true, then even I could qualify for the title to a small extent...I think a lot of us could.;-)
Yes, they were an evil empire back then, but as you said, times have indeed changed...Even tho IBM's share price has increased dramatically since the beginning of the decade, I think it's still fairly safe to describe the blue elephant as a tuskless and altogether completely harmless old beast.;-)
IBM to my mind have been pushed back into the wannabe department. Yes so they've managed to improve things for themselves flogging services, but they still fundamentally have their "solutions" oriented philosophy which dates back to their heyday in the 70s/early 80s. They're trying to get back into prime time, which means they'll get into bed with Linux or anyone else who'll have them for that matter, but unless they change the solutions philosophy, IMHO they're going nowhere fast.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. For my money, Java is, was, and probably always will be a complete waste of time. From what I've been told it's a C/C++ derivative for starters...and I really don't understand why the world needs another one of those. Sure, the shameless wannabes at Sun have been going on about it's universal portability, but it being both compiled *and* interpreted makes it very, very slow...not to mention so processor intensive that it isn't funny. Also yes, there is the classic lake web applet, which certainly looks pretty...but in terms of actually making anything useful for the Web I personally haven't come across anything in Java that you couldn't write to run much more quickly and efficiently in something else. As for it's use in appliances...well, maybe. But again, I don't see the point...except for possible problems like the Y2K bug, why not just use hard coded chips? If you ask me, Sun's new slogan for Java should be:-
"Java : The solution for a problem which doesn't exist."
For my money, Java is, was, and probably always will be a complete waste of time. From what I've been told it's a C/C++ derivative for starters...and I really don't understand why the world needs another one of those. Sure, the shameless wannabes at Sun have been going on about it's universal portability, but it being both compiled *and* interpreted makes it very, very slow...not to mention so processor intensive that it isn't funny.
Also yes, there is the classic lake web applet, which certainly looks pretty...but in terms of actually making anything useful for the Web I personally haven't come across anything in Java that you couldn't write to run much more q
In terms of IBM helping out in the ABMA (Anything But Microsoft Alliance)... Yes, IBM are a corporation who ultimately probably are only looking out for themselves. IBM as most people here prolly know, are a company who a long time ago were dominant re mainframes and (VERY early on) PCs. The reason why barracking for the company these days gives us such a warm fuzzy feeling is because they're the underdog, and we all like cheering the underdog along. I'm not saying I'm one of the people who says "Yay, go IBM!" or someone who still thinks they're bad. To me personally, IBM don't really mean much. Do I think the people who are encouraging them now would stop if they suddenly became important again? This again is also irrelevant...I think we've pretty much seen that IBM don't have the necessary good sense to know how to regain dominance, as far as PCs are concerned anywayz. In his old age, the blue elephant has degenerated into a kindly, tuskless old beast...Simply because he doesn't have the dexterity or common sense these days to really become anything more.
Slashdot Mirror
For someone to be able to say that any given piece of software, but particularly Netscape, is more buggy than something from Microsoft is truly embarassing, wouldn't you say? *grin*
Rest assured...you're completely safe. The Linux community in general would have to undergo a truly mammoth attitude adjustment for Linux to go completely mainstream, IMHO. I'm yet another Windows user who has been turned off Linux...Mainly simply because the people who advocate the operating system are a pack of mindless bigots. Yes it is technically superior, but in my observation UNIX in general tends to turn people into opinionated, elitist assholes. I don't want to become an asshole, so I'm not going to use it. ;-) ;)
I'm also not an incredibly lame hacker wannabe, and I don't have any desire to become one of those, either. Rather than promoting true individuality, UNIX users and Linux users specifically have a tendency to have the attitude that if everyone isn't doing things exactly their way, then they are obviously mentally deficient. Fine, but in a choice between your way or the highway, I'm going to hit the road.
IMHO the key to originality isn't so much coming up with completely new concepts...that only happens once every few thousand years. :)
To me, you can still be perfectly original by taking a large number of old ideas, and arranging them in new combinations. And from that point of view to my mind, the Matrix was moderately original. None of the individual concepts were original...They never are. You're only going to hear a new piece of music...you're never going to hear new notes.
I feel that the majority of the readership of this site are considerably less than objective about a number of issues themselves.
Moderation on Linux related issues in particular is a big indicator of what I mean here...The site is exclusively pro-Linux. If you make comments along the lines of "Linux is good, Linux is wonderful, everyone go out and buy Linux, etc etc," sit back and watch how far your comment will get moderated up. In the same spirit, woe betide you if you just happen to be a Windows user. Another thing that really bugs the hell out of me is how Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond get practically worshipped as deities...They're not deities...They're human beings, and in the case of Raymond in particular, they're not even human beings who write necessarily intelligent material 100% of the time. Yes Raymond has had some intelligent ideas, but if you go to his site you'll also find the writings of someone who is an egotistical smartass a lot of the time.
Stallman is someone who comes across to me as being a lot more impressive, sure...but I still don't find myself worshipping the man. The Slashdot group ARE bigots in just as great a sense as any Christians you'll find are likely to be. They have a polytheistic religion, complete with it's own gods, it's own ministers, and it's own heroes...and anyone who isn't willing to convert is routinely verbally burned at the stake. The religion is called Linux.
The reason why more Christians don't point out how whacked the radical right is, is that most of them support it. A large number of (at least conservative) Christians are of the opinion that a facist system where most anything they didn't agree with got censored, would be a Good Thing. Unfortunately what they don't realise is that if you have social problems, pushing them underground by criminalising them usually only makes them worse, because it makes them harder to police.
The right portal formula, IMHO?
1. First and foremost, you have to take customisation/personalisation to the max. As someone else said in another message, your crucial objective is to give busy users the information they need quickly, and eliminating the noise that they don't. So have passworded individual accounts on the site, the way they do on this one, and customise, customise, customise! If you can do this correctly, you'll be providing an invaluable service to a lot of people...It doesn't have to have much to do with making a buck.
2. The banner issue:- This isn't about being money grubbing and commercialistic, but as I'm sure Commander Taco could tell you, running a popular web site costs money...and sometimes lots of it, hence his acquisition by Andover. Do the banner thing intelligently...Set up perl scripts which are able to match particular banners to people who'll be interested in them, based on account profiles...but if you do it that way, not only are people likely to not see your banners as intrusive and click on them, but who knows? If you have business users, and you're showing banner ads for business suppliers or courses, you may really be helping the user out by connecting him to that information.
3. The Web-based email issue:- Yes, there are some web based email services which really do blow goats, (Hotmail is the main one which immediately comes to mind) and yes maybe they are inherently not as secure as straight POP3, however I would argue that Joe Average User isn't going to really need absolutely bulletproof security anywayz. You put in all the standard disclaimers about not including credit card numbers in emails...and if you're really worried about it, maybe you could try and rig up pgp support somehow.
4. Spiders VS Directories:- Of course a spider is going to be tons better than a directory. A spider updates itself, whereas with a directory like Yahoo the user has to submit a site manually...and if your portal is popular, you then have to employ a batallion of auditors to go through all of the submissions. Try getting a submission on Yahoo within a week or two, and I'll be surprised if you succeed unless you're someone extremely important. Try getting a site on AltaVista, and if you've got your Meta tags and possibly a ROBOTS.TXT written correctly, it'll be there within 72 hours in many cases. ;) make a few bucks on the side.
My suggestion is that if you're thinking of putting a portal up yourself, don't even think about trying to run your own directory...Take advantage of other people who have good spider technology, but maybe a sucky portal by linking to them with one of the affiliate programs that many of them run. Use your head, and your users will thank you, the people who run the spider will thank you if they like getting exposure, and you might even (horrors!
I think that about covers most of the issues that people here seem to have grizzles with. And as I said, if you don't like the existing portals, put one together yourself! I'm in the process of doing it, and it really isn't all that difficult.
People can say portals suck, and maybe in 90% or so of cases they're right, because the faceless corps who run them *are* only interested in making money. But done correctly, I believe a good portal can be an invaluable service to everyone involved. A portal is like anything else...you do a bad portal, and it'll suck...you do a good portal, and it won't.
Slashdot itself, while not a portal par se, is I believe a good example of what I'm talking about. The customisation (the most important element of a portal, IMHO) is done cluefully, and the article system works well. It's a shame that some of it's readers aren't perhaps just a little more broad minded, but hey, you can't have everything. *grin*
For another thing, I've never known anyone who's bought a packaged machine who hasn't received faulty hardware in along with it. I got my first machine second hand in 1994...Since then I've been patching it with parts as I've needed to, and only recently bought and entirely new case and keyboard. With the exception of the original motherboard (which was due to bad wiring in this house anywayz) I've never had a problem with hardware.
Not so for other people I've known who've bought packages. Bad hard drives, bad monitors etc...They've had to take them back to the company several times in some cases.
My third gripe with the big companies is that they rip people off. Back in 94 when I got my first 486 I got it for $2100 AUD. That was a 419 Mb hard drive, monitor, keyboard, 8 Mb of old DRAM, a Trident 1 Mb video card (good at the time), and an ESS 688 sound card, not to mention the loads of warez that was preinstalled on the hard drive. *grin* I wouldn't have seen a machine at that time like that for less than probably $2500 AUD, and my recent upgrade to a Celeron 400 with 64 Mb of SDRAM, a new case, a Voodoo Banshee 16 Mb video card, 13 Gb hard drive cost me and PS/2 keyboard cost $960 as I already had a monitor, mouse, soundcard and 33.6k modem. I wouldn't have seen a recent package with the stuff I got when I upgraded for less than $1200, and in most cases I'd have paid a heap more for the hard drive in particular, so I saved at least $300.
The moral of the story is that if you want to buy a reliable, cheap PC and you don't want to have to be dictated to by the likes of Microsoft and others, then companies like Compaq, Dell, Gateway and so on are absolutely for the birds. They give you nothing you do need, and everything you don't.
It's true...Womens' dedicated sites ARE stupid. From what I see on the net, most of this Webgrrrls and women specific site stuff is put up by lesbians and other mysandronistic scrags anywayz, not anybody who you'd really classify as actual women. More like guys born in womens' bodies who are extremely resentful of that fact. ;-)
They might make a more UNIX friendly version of Windows, but don't hold your breath waiting for the ressurection of Xenix. It won't happen.
Something about the Microsoft philosophy that you must understand is that they believe that they are inherently the best, and they believe this in
such a way that it completely defies logic. I remember reading somewhere online before IE 4 was released how some young snot from MS was bragging on about how much better it was going to be than Netscape. When the person who was talking to him asked him how it would be in terms of specific features, the guy took on a very smug, self-satisfied air and said, "It will simply be better."
Microsoft have exactly the same attitude about Windows. "It's the best cos it's the best cos it's the best cos it's the best."
The idea that any other OS could be superior is completely incomprehensible to virtually the entire Microsoft mindset...So it won't impinge on their consciousness.
I'd be very interested in seeing this happen myself, but a couple of hurdles come to mind, in terms of a distributed, mass-usage scenario or true "virtual world", populated by people and not just bots...
1. Bandwidth:- Until broadband becomes common, and I mean really common, you can probably forget about seeing wide area networked, mainstream VR any time soon. Universities could possibly handle it...a cousin of mine goes to Monash and has access to speed of around 300k/sec...which to me seems pretty fast, but even that could be slow if you have a LOT of people on it and your graphics are really high detail.
2. Hardware:- 3Dfx graphics in particular take a lot of grunt, not to mention keeping track of where everyone is and what they're doing in a largely populated, multiplayer scenario. I'd be interested to see what someone could do with a reasonable sized network of high speed Xeons or SGI machines in this area, but I wouldn't bother with anything less processor wise, if you're talking about a true *world* of large size and with a lot of people. (50-100 or more at a minimum)
One thing I will say, and that is that the site's opening sequence on my modem (33.6) looked like a slide show gone wrong. If the guy who designed the site is as much a professional as the blurb says he is, then you'd think he'd know that one of the golden rules with DHTML is surely to cache/download ALL of your pictures/elements *first*, and THEN animate them...not animate them while the person's modem is still trying to download them at the same time.
So what is a hacker, after all? Eric Raymond offers this definition in the third edition of his New Hacker's Dictionary: ''A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.''
;-)
If this is actually true, then even I could qualify for the title to a small extent...I think a lot of us could.
Yes, they were an evil empire back then, but as you said, times have indeed changed...Even tho IBM's share price has increased dramatically since the beginning of the decade, I think it's still fairly safe to describe the blue elephant as a tuskless and altogether completely harmless old beast. ;-)
IBM to my mind have been pushed back into the wannabe department. Yes so they've managed to improve things for themselves flogging services, but they still fundamentally have their "solutions" oriented philosophy which dates back to their heyday in the 70s/early 80s.
They're trying to get back into prime time, which means they'll get into bed with Linux or anyone else who'll have them for that matter, but unless they change the solutions philosophy, IMHO they're going nowhere fast.
For my money, Java is, was, and probably always will be a complete waste of time. From what I've been told it's a C/C++ derivative for starters...and I really don't understand why the world needs another one of those. Sure, the shameless wannabes at Sun have been going on about it's universal portability, but it being both compiled *and* interpreted makes it very, very slow...not to mention so processor intensive that it isn't funny.
Also yes, there is the classic lake web applet, which certainly looks pretty...but in terms of actually making anything useful for the Web I personally haven't come across anything in Java that you couldn't write to run much more quickly and efficiently in something else. As for it's use in appliances...well, maybe. But again, I don't see the point...except for possible problems like the Y2K bug, why not just use hard coded chips?
If you ask me, Sun's new slogan for Java should be:-
"Java : The solution for a problem which doesn't exist."
I've said it before, and I'll say it again.
For my money, Java is, was, and probably always will be a complete waste of time. From what I've been told it's a C/C++ derivative for starters...and I really don't understand why the world needs another one of those. Sure, the shameless wannabes at Sun have been going on about it's universal portability, but it being both compiled *and* interpreted makes it very, very slow...not to mention so processor intensive that it isn't funny.
Also yes, there is the classic lake web applet, which certainly looks pretty...but in terms of actually making anything useful for the Web I personally haven't come across anything in Java that you couldn't write to run much more q
In terms of IBM helping out in the ABMA (Anything But Microsoft Alliance)...
Yes, IBM are a corporation who ultimately probably are only looking out for themselves. IBM as most people here prolly know, are a company who a long time ago were dominant re mainframes and (VERY early on) PCs. The reason why barracking for the company these days gives us such a warm fuzzy feeling is because they're the underdog, and we all like cheering the underdog along. I'm not saying I'm one of the people who says "Yay, go IBM!" or someone who still thinks they're bad. To me personally, IBM don't really mean much. Do I think the people who are encouraging them now would stop if they suddenly became important again? This again is also irrelevant...I think we've pretty much seen that IBM don't have the necessary good sense to know how to regain dominance, as far as PCs are concerned anywayz.
In his old age, the blue elephant has degenerated into a kindly, tuskless old beast...Simply because he doesn't have the dexterity or common sense these days to really become anything more.