Comparing apples and oranges (was Re: Ridin' Through Gateway Country, Roundin' up details....)

[damaged justice <frogfarm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[re Win95]

> >...not as great as OS/2 which I've been using at this point for years, but
> >it's okay as long as you don't think of it as anything more than what it is 
> >-- MS-DOS 7.0 and Windows 4.0." 
> With the volume of data a lot of people are handling today, and with todays 
> hardware, a description like that means that it just doesn't cut it for A LOT
> of apps. The market is telling me this; lots of clients have done evals of
> '95, and they've moved on to something else, NT or one of the Unices.

In the professional market, I have no quibbles with this claim. The home
market can still be well served with "toys" more often than not. 

> >It's been at least as reliable for me as DOS has ever been, if not more, 
> >and I actually enjoy using it enough that I'll always have at least one box
> >running it.
> I'm pleased that SOMEONE has a stable install of Win95; this is one of the 
> cases I've heard of. Have you ever had to solve a problem by reinstalling or
> doing extensive recovery work?

Never. The only repetitive problem was with a legacy ISA sound card; 95
would occasionally "forget" it existed, but all I had to do was remove it
from the hardware profile and reinstall the driver. I did this on a handful
of occasions over the past six months until finally even this failed to do
the trick. But this is as bad as it got.

> >...thrashing it, doing "weird" things... compiling
> Wait a minute... compiling is "weird?". If I can't compile something on a 
> box, it's actually useless to me (usually). I mean, Microsoft makes compilers
> and IDE's (a couple of which I use in NT and elsewhere), so why's it wierd?

You'll note that I put "weird" in quotes. The stuff I mentioned may be no
big deal to us, but to most people it's black magic. Then again, most
people have a hard time figuring out how to make their VCR's do anything
other than flash high noon. 

The average user certainly does not compile programs. Semi-power users like
me can do it if necessary, even though I'm just "going through the motions"
(I can program very trivial things with BASIC, batch files, shell scripts
and the like, but on the whole, I can't and don't write code).

> > running non-standard TCP/IP applications like the RC5 distributed client...
> Why is this "weird"?, and what "non-standard" about the RC5 client. It's either
> a compliant TCP/IP app or it isn't. Please explain.

Anything that uses anything other than port 23 or 80 is black magic to your
average user.

> >logging in and out of different profiles....
> Look, I don't know what you think is "normal", but I do know that verything
> you've mentioned here is completely within the boundaries of normal system
> admin and operation. If there's any question that an OS can't or doesn't
> handle these things fairly well, it's a real problem.

What we consider "normal" is not what Joe Sixpack considers normal.

Microsoft can be thought of as McDonald's. They try to satisfy everyone and
end up being mediocre, at best. But that's okay, because *most people*
don't need anything better. Especially those who don't leave their systems
on 24/7 (and who can say why they do such strange things? :).

> There's no need to stop because this is a Linux list. As I said before, if
> we don't eval the competition, we may find ourselves unable to compete in
> an MS dominated world. Advocating something we think is better means that
> we'll have to know how the products we're supporting stack up against the
> competition.

Thank you, although I'll try to keep my primary emphasis on Linux. I don't
advocate any system without context, though -- "better" must necessarily
raise the question, "better for whom, and for what purpose?"

> >Your points regarding NT are valid to an extent, although again it hasn't
> >behaved as badly... But I wouldn't use a butter knife to cut steak, either.
> I tend to have more or less steaklike problems to solve, most of the time.
> In fact, the steak frequently comes to me burnt to a crisp, so it's REALLY
> tough! :) Butter knives are (almost) useless to me.

Point taken. But the fact that DOS (with or without some form of Windows on
top) is still in such widespread use shows that most people are content
with butter knives -- and not necessarily always because they've never
known anything better existed. DOS meets some people's needs quite well,
and with Caldera's OpenDOS (now once again named DR-DOS -- myself, as long
as it's truly open, that's what I'll call it) free for individual use, there's 
no need to remain "beholden" to Microsoft in any way. (I have WfW running
on an OpenDOS box at the office, and have found no compatibility problems.)

> Let's look at price-performance. I paid over $1.5K for the NT software I 
> have, and there's a goodly amount of stuff I need to do that I just cannot 
> accomplish under NT. Add to that over $4K of time (so far), to get it config-
> ured and keep it running. Professionally, I've spent about $2.5K in time to
> keep Linux running, but only about $60.00 for the software. The only thing I
> cannot do in Linux is test and compile for NT!

Depending on one's circumstances, one can often use free or low-cost
programs in a Windows environment. Obviously, the pointy-haired boss may
have ultimate say in what tools you are "allowed" to use on the job, but
there are often many alternatives to expensive commercial applications,
even in the non-Unix worlds.

> >I have no quarrel with someone spending more than they need to, as long as
> >they get what they want -- AND, if they know how much "extra" they're paying
> >that they really don't need to. 
> Hey, it's your money, right? If you want to throw some of it away, who am I to
> stop you? Nobody, and I've never prevented someone from buying anything like
> that. What I have done is present what I know about the business and attempted
> to inform people BEFORE they buy. About 98% of the time, people opt not to 
> spend more than they clearly see need to.

Your experience -- and opinion -- parallels my own in this respect.


[re litigation inhibiting true progress]

"In ten years we're gonna have,
 One million lawyers..."
  - Tom Paxton

--
Write your representatives and complain. Demand that they institute the death
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and "thinking about possibly contemplating an action which may be considered a
crime at some point in the future."  ['TruthMonger', on the cypherpunks list]