Joe Zeff posted on Tue, 30 Mar 2010 10:32:40 -0700 as excerpted: > I stuck with Win98 long after others had moved on partially
FWIW, there are two things, that still strike me as ironic about that whole thing. 1) I ran the public betas for IE4 thru 5.5, and was inline for Windows 98 at midnight, the day it came out. How fast that changed, both in where MS went and where I went after that, for MS to pass the line I could not cross with eXPrivacy, driving me to Linux. 1998-2001. Three short years! What a change and what an effect it had on my life! Sometimes I look back at what might have been had I gone another way... and shudder much as I do when I think how close I came to blowing myself and possibly others up, with the nervous breakdown that was the climax of my third and last victimization. Certainly, coming out of them and learning what was to me the pretty literal survival point of assertive choice as I did, played a big part in the degree to which I pursued Linux once I became aware that MS was no longer an option I could personally tolerate, at least legally. Had I stayed, I would have been playing the victim once again, and I was **DONE** with that! 2) The fact that even tho I intellectually agreed that Linux was the way to go, after a decade on MS, had MS not pushed me with where they took eXPrivacy that I could not and would not go, I'd very possibly still be on MS, today. It was very much that push that got me to finally get down to researching the switch in earnest, as I realized that I could not maintain personal integrity and stay on a platform with the anti-user/anti-privacy features of eXPrivacy. One of the other choices (there's that word again) that I had was going 100% pirate, disabling those anti-features, which would have been highly ironic as well given that was the purported thing they were trying to prevent, but Linux was the free conscience choice, and I quickly realized after I switched the choice of freedom as well. Yes it took their push, but that has to be the best choice I ever made in my computing life, and I've never regretted it. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
