On 15/06/10 23:29, Roy Wood wrote: Hi Roy, good to hear from you. Hope you are well.
> I know that there are a whole bumch of 'free > software' guerillas out there That'll be me then! ;-) > but no free software has ever matched the > commercial stuff - sad as that may be. Forgive me, but that is total bullsh*t! I presume you use the internet then? What's running most of it is not commercial software, but Apache, PHP, HTML, XML etc. Note, nothing there out of Redmond - there are a few IIS servers out there serving up web pages, I grant you, but last time I saw the official figures, over 70% of the internet was running on Apache. Apache is free and as I have to look after both it and IIS at work, guess which one I *don't* have to spend much time with? (Clue: It's not IIS) Linux too, which I know from the past you simply don't like, that's free and much more reliable than Windows. I presume you have heard of Microsoft's Express editions of SQL Server (that's like a database!), Visual C++, Visual Basic et al - they are free and of decent enough quality - they are just restricted versions of the production versions after all. Oracle, that's commercial, it's also free in the XE version. Free for commercial, non-commercial or any use you like, without a need to pay (huge!) sums of money to Oracle. Firefox, Opera - decent standards compliant browsers, IE8 - still not CSS compliant, never has been and I suspect, never will be. Thunderbird too. Need a free (open source) database? Try Firebird, PostGresSQL (Spelling?) - the list of quality free software is quite substantial. Now, there are only a few examples there, but all are free (as in no-cost, not necessarily Free as in you are free to do with it as you please) and all, with the exception of SQL Server (!), are quality. Ok, rant over. I agree with most of your other comments though. The QL is dead, long ago. It was dead really before it started out in life in my opinion, but that never stopped me having 5 of the damned things! It was a "32 bit" machine, erm no it bloody wasn't! It was a business machine - fraid not. The QL never knew what it actually was - unlike the Spectrum and ZX-81 (my other Sinclairs) which did have their own niche in the market. There is no point, really, in bringing it back to life - it never had one to start with! I think QUANTA was well named, Tinkerers, that's what we QL users are really. We tinker with a machine, making it do things it was never designed to do, and we have fun! I agree that some poeple ran a business using the QL - doing so, probably taught them the meaning of "make a backup" - mine used to hang every time the fridge or freezer turned on, most irritating. The PC has never done so. If we try to raise the QL above the hobby and tinkerer level, we won't attract new users (in my opinion) simply because, as you say, you can do word processing, spreadsheets, graphics, photos, databases, video editing, programming in dog knows how many different languages, just about anything in fact. (Ok, maybe not magazine production, quality music or real graphic artistry - you'd most likely use a Mac for that) but the quality is far superior to anything the QL can provide. But then again, the QL is circa 1984 and this is 2010 and Moore's Law still applies. Mind you, I'd love to see a PC doing so well with only 32KB or ROM and 128 KB of RAM! And as for Windows 7, don't start me off again! It's being heavily advertised on TV at the moment. How wonderful that I can save "mouse clicks" by only having to click once to launch a program - gee, I've been doing that on Linux since at least 2001. And "auto aligning windows" please, get real. Linux (X11) always has done! And these are the best bits of Windows 7? I have it on this laptop, and I'm sticking with Linux. That's my opinion, you probably think otherwise, that's allowed too! I do get a tad teed off when people slag off Linux or Windows without giving it proper thought and without trying it. (Not accusing you of this by the way - I don't know how long you tried Linux for, or how long ago!) They are two different ways of doing what you want to do, if something works for you, stick with it and be happy. That's what I've done. I remember a long time ago you complaining that what you hated about Linux was having to use the root account to do things and your own account for normal work. Welcome to secure computing - I happen to work with may systems and each has an admin account of some sort, even Windows these days. (Although on XP, the administrator account is supplied with no password! Guess why so many XP boxes are running as zombies now?) However, as I said, each to their own. If it works, so be it. > I will never abandon it completely because it taught me a lot of the > fundamental principles of computing. I have a lot of affection for it > and for many of the people in the QL community because we did all those > shows and we went through all that but you have to take off the rose > tinted goggles and take a hard look at what you are promoting - and then > decide what you do from here. I'm agreeing again! The QL had one of the best Basic's around and still has in my opinion. In fact, SuperBasic is probably one of the best languages around, never mind Basic. And lets face it, the rose tinted glasses appeal to all of us when someone is "dissing" our favourite toy. I have a colleague at work who fell for the iPhone then the iPad and hates both. But if you criticise any of them, beware, he is a zealot of the highest degree and will defend these things to the death I suspect. Even though, in use, he hates them! Anyway, I'm ranting again! Better stop. Good to hear from you, as I said above. Take care. The football is on, I'm off to watch some paint drying! Cheers, Norman. _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
