Robert Wittig wrote: > It's my computer. I bought it, I paid for it, and any company that > wants control over the contents of my hard drive, or whether or not I > choose to register my software, or control what people see when they > visit my website, can go screw themselves. Microsoft literally drove > me out of the fold with a rude, arrogant, pointed, overpriced stick, > and it is too late for them to woo me back. Even if they were giving > away free copies of XP, with the controls it has on it now, I would > not consider installing it.
I dont think we've seen arrogance like this since the days of the robber barons a century ago. As the Greeks said, "Those who the gods will destroy, they first make proud." i can understand their desire to eliminate piracy, but in this case, they have so encumbered the paying customer, I cannot see how they can retain market share. It is odd that so many cannot see how they can compete with 'free' open source, and at the same time, how the 'open source' distros can keep up with the technology. I think maybe they should not try. I expect, that if anyone comes up with a simple single user Linux os that focuses on robust and crashproof code, they'll get a lot of market share. Damn few of us really care about editing multimedia presentations, and as for the 3D games, well that's what the Play station is for. Instead, what I see in alternative os's is a plethora of distros and editions of each. Right now, for instance, I've got a Tekram PCI scsi card. The Tekram site lists a driver for BSD, but it is BSD 1.1 and I got BSD 2.2. Likewise, I got Corel, Debian, Mandrake and Redhat, and in every single case, I aint got an up to date driver that will work with any of them. Support refered me to some guy in Taiwan, who sent me an address for a driver for RH7.2, but after three tries, where it tells me that it dont recognize the CDrom (I got an ide cdrom)... I am here bitching about it insteadda installing the distro. The installation readme.txt runs five pages. However, I did find a tkrmscsi.sys driver for dos, stuck that in config.sys, and the dr-dos ide dont have any problem running the scsi. Got that? just one driver. ten seconds to install. works with any dos. What I am running into is what Kauffman calls the 'complexity catastrophe'. >From what I can tell, if I have one distro on a drive, and want to try another, it will also install a new copy of netscape, and I have the tedious job of rebuilding my bookmark file. Maybe some of you know about Arachne. Their hotlist.htm is plain and simple and easy to edit with any wordprocessor, it aint hard to find, it can be easily transfered from one drive to any other, and with a text editor is easy to cut and paste or regroup the websites. If I wanted to replace DR-DOS with ROM-DOS, FREEDOS, or even some MS-DOS, no problem, duck soup. sys.com will getcha there. and it wont mess with anything else on the hard drive. But the Nix distros are all so complex, I dont see how ordinary users can do anything but overwrite the whole damn partition. And while theoretically, I should be able to copy WINE and Corel's PHOTOPAINT & WORDPERFECT to one of my other distros, dependancies seem so complex I dont think I have the balls to try. It is like needing a different edition of Arachne or Neopaint for every dos distribution out there. not cool. To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
