Re: For those in need of some amusement.....

[Rick Hayner <rhayner@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have a few comments concerning windows95 and windows98.

If it's such good software, why on earth doesn't it have decent error
checking built in to it?  It's supposed to be so user friendly, yet if
you breath on the keyboard or mouse wrong, it dies!!!

I'm totally blind, so maybe windows isn't as user friendly to me is it
is to a sighted person, but I have a screen reader that's supposed to
tell me what's going on in windows.  

I come from a dos background, so the cli doesn't bother me that much.
However the help system in windows compaired to linux is a real
farce.  The only time I've seen linux crash, it was because of
operator error, editing a file and putting something in it in the
wrong way, but even if my system were to totally die today, I can have
it back up in running in about an hour, and this includes reformatting
the hard drive, and recreating both the dos and linux partitions, and
restoring from tape.  

Chris, believe me, if you put fourth the effort to learn linux and
learn it well, the effort you put into this will be worth it time
after time after time.  I've been using Linux since april, and I'm
still learning things about it.  I've got a lot of blind friends, who
are forced to use windows because of their jobs.  However, I've had
enough of windows problems over the last 3 years to last me for the
rest of my life, and I'll turn down a fifty thousand dollar a year job
if I have to use windows to do it.  You don't know what a royal pain
it is when I had to be without my system sometimes for 4 or 5 days at
a time, waiting to have a sighted person come and help me reinstall
windows95, because I did something it didn't like, and lost my speech
output and even though I tried for hours, couldn't get the stupid
thing back up and running. 

Even if linux were to die, and my backup tapes were to be distroyed, I
could do a new installation without having to wait for someone else to
come and help me.

Believe me, knowing how things really work is worth every second
required to learn it when you have a problem, and at least linux gives
error messages that mean something.  I've gotten error messages in
windows95 that microsoft's tech guys had no idea about as far as what
caused it, and how to get rid of it.

I'll admit that my three years of computer training back in the 1970s
and early 1980s helped me tremendously, but at least I can keep my
system running, by using the man pages and the info program to look up
things.

I'm not being critical of anyone on this list, but I think god for
linux every day, because when I can write an email message to the
developer of my distrobution of linux, and he cares enough about my
problems that he will take the time to reply to my email just tells me
something about the linux people.  Just try it with Bill Gates, and
let me know how long it takes you to get a reply!  Chances are, you
probably won't be able to get his email address, and even if you do,
either he will not receive it, because he probably has people going
through his email to choose which messages he gets to see.  And even
if you would be lucky enough that he got it, I bet you would never
hear from him.  

When I was taught to program, I had a mainframe with 400mb of hard
drive space, 200mb was taken up by the system, and a grand total of
64k of magnetic core memory.  You used the fewest instructions
possible to accomplish the task, and they not only wanted it to work,
but to be as efficient as possible.  I don't want to even hear about
how efficient windows is.  I can boot into dos, run my dos screen
reader, and move 4 directories of files, before windows95 even comes
up.  Sure, I had to spend a couple of months learning dos, but now, I
can do anything that I want to under it, and within the next year,
I'll be able to do the same thing under Linux.

not only that, you have a huge advantage over me, because you have
access to all of the printed material that's available for Linux, and
I have to wait until it's been recorded onto tape for me to use it.

Sorry for the soapbox here, but I kind of really get on it when I hear
someone talking about how wonderful windows 95, 98, or nt is.  I won't
comment on nt, because I'm not familliar with it, but I'll take linux
over any other operating system available, because the developers give
a darn!

Sincerely,
-- 
Rick Hayner
rhayner@complink.net
Member spebsqsa, Baritone Kalamazoo Mall City Chorus.
Amateur radio station wa8jqv