I appreciate that there are some purely technical improvements and maybe
even innovations which each new upgrade. But the overall effect is to
burden the user with more and more extraneous junk and require more and more
frequent hardware purchases. We are now on a mandatory three year hardware
replacement cycle. The power-point upgrade version that comes with 2000 is
almost impossible to use compared to the earlier version. We have this
great laptop projection technology but people are so afraid of a tech crash
at their presentation that now it is routine to bring a laptop with the
power-point files install AND to make back-up color transparencies. The
files are so huge that you can't put them on a disc (but now we are getting
zip-drives and CD burners to "solve" that problem). This is the ultimate in
Galbraithian planned obsolence. Like I said, great for the economy, just
like Military Keynesianism. But what about the composition of GDP, not just
its size, not to mention the composition of the human activity. A lot of
the "externalities" of the MiS-technology ends up in people like me staying
hours (unpaid) overtime to fix the bugs. Sure, we have a growing army of
computer support staff, but they can't keep up with the exponential increase
in computer dysfunction.
-----Original Message-----
From: ravi narayan [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2001 1:12 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [PEN-L:11931] Re: RE: technology as a reason for hope?
warning: this message has nothing whatsoever to do with economics!
Brown, Martin (NCI) wrote:
> I hope this is wrong. I'm still trying to recover from the Windows 2000
> upgrade. The idea that every new, and forced, MicroCrap upgrade increases
> productivity is some kind of cruel joke. I, and 99% of users, do
> essentially the same kind of thing with word-processing and slide making
> that we did 20 years ago with programs like wordstar. It's just twice as
> hard and expensive now than it was then and there is this god-damned
little
> paperclip animation that keeps irritating me AND WON'T GO AWAY.
>
windows 2000 is definitely a more stable and mature platform (than
windows 95/98) and is the first time that microsoft has offered a
real multi-user multi-tasking OS for end users (of course thats not
entirely right - microsoft pitches ME for end users). in particular
the long overdue differentiation of user and system execution space
finally alleviates the frequent windows problems of program crashes
or hangs killing the entire system.
without a doubt you are right about the uselessness of the many
upgrades, that are offered by microsoft, for applications such as
word etc. it is also probably of limited gain to upgrade from 98 or
ME to XP. but if you must use windows, then windows 2000 is indeed
a better option as an operating system, than 98 or equivalents.
and as for "clippy" and your irritation with it, in fact that might
be the only reason for you to move to XP!!
http://www.microsoft.com/office/clippy/
--ravi
