I'm sorry to get so enraged. When I think of the hundreds and hundreds of hours I spent in Windoze trying to fix stupid errors that should not have happened and that I now know were only the result of bad software, I have a tendency to get furious.
I recall when I first got my new Windoze 95 Pentium 166 machine back in 1995. Upon having my first (of thousands of) 'fatal error(s)' after innocently starting the machine up (it had been working fine hours earlier), I got onto the Microsoft helpline (after a few hours on hold) and the conversation went something like this: "My computer just crashed, and I have a blue screen that says 'fatal error at winsoc 386.95200115993.231.2223 stack dump 0000100011110010111001101000000010100100010100101001 1100001000111100101110000001101001010010001010010100 1111 00001000111100101110011010010100100010100101001 0011001000111100101000110011010010100100010100101001 0000100011100000100101110011010010100100010100101001 0011111001000111100101110011010010100100010100101001 0000100110111100000101110011010010100100010100101001 0000101111100111100101110011010010100100010100101001. What should I do?" "You must reboot from your startup CD" "But I'll Lose everything. Isn't there anything else I can do" "No." "I have hundreds of hours of work on this machine. Is there any way of retrieving it?" "No." "Where can I get a book listing the error messages in Windoze 95?" "A book?" "Yeah, you know, a book explaining what the error messages mean and how to fix them." "There is no book." "Well how do you fix your machines?" "You must reinstall Windoze 95 from your startup CD." "Surely to God there must be a listing somewhere of all the possible error messages and what to do to fix them. What does winsoc 386.95200.... mean" "We can't tell you that." "Why not?" It's SOURCE CODE! You must reboot your machine from the startup CD." And so on. Dozens and dozens of times. Most of the time with absolutely no warning. And everytime I was led to believe that I had done something wrong, and that I was somehow an idiot for not knowing what 'illegal function at vdx.586.0010245673472.23459723592365.001001001001111101001'.... means. I remember then the absolute NIGHTMARE upgrade to Windoze 98 that cost me hundreds and hundreds of hours of lost productivity and frustration. I remember simply trying to add a new video card to that pile of crap, and the hundreds of hours searching for little driver bits here and there, crossing and uncrossing jumpers, uninstalling this and disabling that and piddling around with stupid shit for STUFF THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE COMPATIBLE! PLUG AND PLAY! IT SAID SO RIGHT ON THE BOX! AND SO DID THE MICROCRAP WEBSITE! I don't buy the argument about many platforms. It is all predominantly the same chip. The general unsuspecting public has been sold a pile of crap. If we had bought a refrigerator with this kind of reliability, the company would have been out of business years ago. How about a car that just dies without warning five or six times a week, and they won't tell you how to fix it, just to reinstall an engine (at your expense). There would be rioting in the streets. But somehow, Gates and his band of bandits have got away with this by making us feel stupid and inept. And people continue to buy it. It is uncanny to me. The little bit extra you pay for a Mac will be more than made up for in lost production time, frustration, aggravation, etc. Any little problem that crops up is dealt with on the Macfixit website, or Apple comes out with a fix before I even know there is a problem. I have had two crashes on this machine in a year and a half. Both were early on before I knew what i was doing, and neither time did I lose any data. On a Mac, you can reinstall the operating system 'in place' without losing any data. You have a choice of 'in place', reinstall 'in place' and move everything else to a separate file, or to wipe the hard drives clean and totally restart. Makes perfect sense to me. Mac has long been the innovator: look at where the Palm Pilot came from (remember the Mac 'Lisa', and the 'Newton'?). And incidentally, Mr. McRae, Mac was given permission to use the graphic interface from Xerox; Gates, however, stole it from Mac, and pretended it was some great innovation of his making and got us all to believe it! I was fooled, too. And don't forget there were lawsuits, many of them, and continues to be lawsuits, as you know. Unfortunately, Mr. Gates now has so much money he can out manoevre even the US Government. It is a sad commentary on the state of our society that someone can get so rich on the basis of such an awful product that was initially stolen. Windoze and its descendants are the product of deceipt and thievery, and the company that makes it is driven only by out and out greed. The American Dream at its absolute worst. End of rant. Cameron Hood PS: The Digibino is great! I can forsee many many thousands of bootleg photos from concerts, plays, festivals, etc., as people will be bringing them in as they just look like binoculars! It's like something Bill Gates himself would build, and then innocently state "They're for bird watching!" - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
