"Unless IE can actually be physically uninstalled easily and quickly, the threat still remains."
It can be effectively removed from all versions of Win 9x with this little widget:
http://www.litepc.com/ieradicator.html
So many individuals & businesses I know still use 98SE. It is also the most commonly bootlegged of all the Win OSs. Call it out of date, unsupported and unstable, it is still all the OS that most casual users either need or, based on their limited experience, can tolerate. With IE removed and Mozilla or Firefox inserted, a decent anti-virus programme (NOT Norton or McAfee) and a software or hardware firewall most people are happy. I love Linux but it is still a tough sell.
It is interesting to note that the U.S. has about 40 million illiterates, 10 million greater than the entire population of Cuba. This is a poor, U.S. embargoed country whose adult population, by UN estimates, is about 98% literate. Go figure.
I haven't bought a floppy disk for years & years but still have what I consider a "lifetime" supply. About 6-7 years ago, a neighborhood drug peddler (of the legal pharmaceutical variety) disposed of about
100 floppy disks containing a promotional calendar that women could use to keep track of their ovulation cycle for some sort of birth control pill.
Seems that went over like a lead balloon, so he dumped them in the trash & I recovered them. I also checked out garage sales for a time. Those older disks are far more reliable. I would put my long term failure rate at no more than 20%. Not bad for used disks. Now that that the 2.6 kernel will no longer fit on a bootable floppy & with usb
memory devices getting cheaper & bootable, my floppy supply may last longer than a lifetime.
Staroffice has a built in Wordperfect converter. In Linux I use wpd2sxw built from a tarball. It converts Wordperfect files to the Openoffice format. The downside is that its a dreaded command line program:
$ wpd2sxw "blah blah.wpd" blah blah.sxw"
Works like a charm. Even taught my daughter ("I hate Linux") to use it for some files she had to edit. Off course she then converted them to.doc files so she could work on them in the comfort of M$.
To satisfy these so-called "silly people" for whom the net is mostly used to send email & look at a the odd web page our local cable cooperative has come out with a low speed economy cable package. It is a 64K line that costs about $8.95CDN per month for the first 6 months & $12.95CDN thereafter. Here, in the middle of nowhere, Regina, Saskatchewan, we get better service than (as a guess) 80% of the U.S.. Go figure- must be because we are all "communists". Check it out at: http://www.accesscomm.ca/access?&PREVIEW=TRUE &PAGE ID=165
The feature that keeps me using KDE instead of GNOME is ALT-Click. In KDE, if you ALT-Rt.click on a window, you can resize by moving the mouse. It is much nicer than having to find a 2 pixel wide bar and clicking on it. Combine this with ALT-Lt.click to move any window without having to catch the title bar, and window management becomes much easier and quicker.
You are all so dazzled by the commodity form that you cannot "think out of the box" & see that the process of commodification is endemic to capitalism as is the notion of scarcity, well as the fiction of the "Law of Supply & Demand". This is no where better exposed than in the writings of Thorsten Veblen, a unique & much neglected U.S. economist & social critic. This little excerpt for your gestation is from his "The Engineers and the Price System" (1921):
The mechanical industry of the new order is inordinately productive. So the rate and volume of output have to be regulated with a view to what the traffic will bear -- that is to say, what will yield the largest net return in terms of price to the business men who manage the country's industrial system. Otherwise there will be "overproduction," business depression, and consequent hard times all around. Overproduction means production in excess of what the market will carry off at a sufficiently profitable price. So it appears that the continued prosperity of the country from day to day hangs on a "conscientious withdrawal of efficiency" by the business men who control the country's industrial output. They control it all for their own use, of course, and their own use means always a profitable price. In any community that is organized on the price system, with investment and business enterprise, habitual unemployment of the available industrial plant and workmen, in whole or in part, appears to be the indispensable condition without which tolerable conditions of life cannot be maintained. That is to say, in no such community can the industrial system be allowed to work at full capacity for any appreciable interval of time, on pain of business stagnation and consequent privation for all classes and conditions of men. The requirements of profitable business will not tolerate it. So the rate and volume of output must be adjusted to the needs of the market, not to the working capacity of the available resources, equipment and man power, nor to the community's need of consumable goods. Therefore there must always be a certain variable margin of unemployment of plant and man power. Rate and volume of output can, of course, not be adjusted by exceeding the productive capacity of the industrial system. So it has to be regulated by keeping short of maximum production by more or less as the condition of the market may require. It is always a question of more or less unemployment of plant and man power, and a shrewd moderation in the unemployment of these available resources, a "conscientious withdrawal of efficiency," therefore, is the beginning of wisdom in all sound workday business enterprise that has to do with industry.
His analysis of the relationship between "big business" and the application of science & technology is first rate even if his suggested resolution seems more fanciful today than when he first proposed it.
Great Browser. It seems to resolve pages with imbedded jpegs & other image files far better than Moz. 1.6. As for the name. Have these otherwise creative folks no imagination. If they want to stick with the "fire" theme may I suggest "Fireweed". A Google search only brings up some lodge in Alaska. The rest all seem to be botanical descriptions of a plant that thrives in forested areas after a fire. It's the perfect name. Feeling scorched by IE- try Fireweed.
2. A speculation comes from Chris Gulker in an IT Managers Journal article that Microsoft will introduce an MSLinux when Longhorn turns out to be unsellable. (Good thing or bad thing? I think good, if it happened.)
I thought it already had:
http://www.mslinux.org/:)
Slashdot Mirror
"Unless IE can actually be physically uninstalled easily and quickly, the threat still remains."
It can be effectively removed from all versions of
Win 9x with this little widget:
http://www.litepc.com/ieradicator.html
So many individuals & businesses I know still use 98SE. It is also the most commonly bootlegged of all the Win OSs. Call it out of date, unsupported and unstable, it is still all the OS that most casual users either need or, based on their limited experience, can tolerate. With IE removed and Mozilla or Firefox inserted, a decent anti-virus programme (NOT Norton or McAfee) and a software or hardware firewall most people are happy.
I love Linux but it is still a tough sell.
It is interesting to note that the U.S. has about 40
million illiterates, 10 million greater than the entire population of Cuba. This is a poor, U.S. embargoed country whose adult population, by UN estimates, is about 98% literate.
Go figure.
I haven't bought a floppy disk for years & years but still have what I consider a "lifetime" supply. About 6-7 years ago, a neighborhood drug peddler (of the legal pharmaceutical variety) disposed of about 100 floppy disks containing a promotional calendar that women could use to keep track of their ovulation cycle for some sort of birth control pill. Seems that went over like a lead balloon, so he dumped them in the trash & I recovered them. I also checked out garage sales for a time. Those older disks are far more reliable. I would put my long term failure rate at no more than 20%. Not bad for used disks. Now that that the 2.6 kernel will no longer fit on a bootable floppy & with usb memory devices getting cheaper & bootable, my floppy supply may last longer than a lifetime.
Staroffice has a built in Wordperfect converter. In Linux I use wpd2sxw built from a tarball. It converts Wordperfect files to the Openoffice format. The downside is that its a dreaded command line program:
.doc files so she could work on them in the comfort of M$.
$ wpd2sxw "blah blah.wpd" blah blah.sxw"
Works like a charm. Even taught my daughter ("I hate
Linux") to use it for some files she had to edit. Off course she then converted them to
To satisfy these so-called "silly people" for whom the net is mostly used to send email & look at a the odd web page our local cable cooperative has come out with a low speed economy cable package. It isE &PAGE ID=165
:)
a 64K line that costs about $8.95CDN per month for the first 6 months & $12.95CDN thereafter. Here, in
the middle of nowhere, Regina, Saskatchewan, we get better service than (as a guess) 80% of the U.S..
Go figure- must be because we are all "communists".
Check it out at:
http://www.accesscomm.ca/access?&PREVIEW=TRU
Louie Ling
"Is this another ploy from Microsoft to not look like the bad guy, or do you think they are embracing on the Open Source movement?"
:)
Extending and embracing would be more like it.
Louie Ling
I thougth China, Japan and Korea were already ;)
:)
standardized on bootleg copies of Windoze XP
Louie Ling
The feature that keeps me using KDE instead of GNOME is ALT-Click. In KDE, if you ALT-Rt.click on a window, you can resize by moving the mouse. It is much nicer than having to find a 2 pixel wide bar and clicking on it. Combine this with ALT-Lt.click to move any window without having to catch the title bar, and window management becomes much easier and quicker.
;)
:)
Funny, thats what keeps me using WindowMaker
Louie Ling
You are all so dazzled by the commodity form that you cannot "think out of the box" & see that the process of commodification is endemic to capitalism
l en /
as is the notion of scarcity, well as the fiction
of the "Law of Supply & Demand". This is no where
better exposed than in the writings of Thorsten Veblen, a unique & much neglected U.S. economist & social critic. This little excerpt for your gestation is from his "The Engineers and the Price
System" (1921):
The mechanical industry of the new order is inordinately productive. So the
rate and volume of output have to be regulated with a view to what the
traffic will bear -- that is to say, what will yield the largest net return in
terms of price to the business men who manage the country's industrial
system. Otherwise there will be "overproduction," business depression, and
consequent hard times all around. Overproduction means production in
excess of what the market will carry off at a sufficiently profitable price. So
it appears that the continued prosperity of the country from day to day hangs
on a "conscientious withdrawal of efficiency" by the business men who
control the country's industrial output. They control it all for their own use,
of course, and their own use means always a profitable price. In any
community that is organized on the price system, with investment and
business enterprise, habitual unemployment of the available industrial plant
and workmen, in whole or in part, appears to be the indispensable condition
without which tolerable conditions of life cannot be maintained. That is to
say, in no such community can the industrial system be allowed to work at
full capacity for any appreciable interval of time, on pain of business
stagnation and consequent privation for all classes and conditions of men.
The requirements of profitable business will not tolerate it. So the rate and
volume of output must be adjusted to the needs of the market, not to the
working capacity of the available resources, equipment and man power, nor
to the community's need of consumable goods. Therefore there must always
be a certain variable margin of unemployment of plant and man power. Rate
and volume of output can, of course, not be adjusted by exceeding the
productive capacity of the industrial system. So it has to be regulated by
keeping short of maximum production by more or less as the condition of the
market may require. It is always a question of more or less unemployment
of plant and man power, and a shrewd moderation in the unemployment of
these available resources, a "conscientious withdrawal of efficiency,"
therefore, is the beginning of wisdom in all sound workday business
enterprise that has to do with industry.
To read the rest of this essay see:
http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/veb
His analysis of the relationship between "big business" and the application of science & technology is first rate even if his suggested resolution seems more fanciful today than when he
first proposed it.
Great Browser. It seems to resolve pages with imbedded jpegs & other image files far better than
Moz. 1.6.
As for the name. Have these otherwise creative folks
no imagination. If they want to stick with the "fire" theme may I suggest "Fireweed". A Google
search only brings up some lodge in Alaska. The rest
all seem to be botanical descriptions of a plant that thrives in forested areas after a fire. It's the perfect name. Feeling scorched by IE- try Fireweed.
2. A speculation comes from Chris Gulker in an IT Managers Journal article that Microsoft will introduce an MSLinux when Longhorn turns out to be unsellable. (Good thing or bad thing? I think good, if it happened.) I thought it already had: http://www.mslinux.org/ :)