On 14 Sep 2006 at 17:28, Hugh Gundersen wrote: > You know what guys,,,,, Given all the bad press and Crap about Windows OS when > you really think about the OS (any of them from Win 1 to XP pro) and the > associated programs like word, excel, powerpoint, frontpage etc. arn't they > just > amazing what they can do?
Speaking as the resident devil's advocate hereabouts... I'm not sure which 'bad press' you're referring to. There are few such comments here, of course. BUT: easy on the compliments... "amazing" is in the eye of the beholder. If you had used a Lisp machine in the 70s or a Connection machine in the 80s [or hell, even got to play on Doug Englebart's PDP-10 in the 60s], much of what we're using now would appear to be a lot less amazing -- in fact, in some respects it'd STILL have a way to go to be as good-as-the-best 30yrs ago. "Word" is not much more amazing [to me, at least], than was MacWrite 30yrs ago.. and, indeed, I thought MacWrite was pretty amazing. To my view, excel isn't a lot more amazing than Visicalc. ...etc... As far as the OS goes, I'm one of the folk who mostly never much liked any of the "desktop" line of Windows OSs. I'd had too much experience with much more secure and reliable OSs to take any of those Windows systems seriously. With XP I'm a pretty happy camper, although the number of people not taking advantage of its security stuff has helped give MS a bad name in this regard [not helped by MS which, IMO, did a pretty big hatchet job of presenting and supporting all that neat machinery. It *IS* easy to run XP securely, and 99.999% of XP's users would benefit greatly from doing so [actually everyone would, but I don't want to argue that again], but MS didn't do the job it should have both to educate users as they moved to XP, hammer on app developers to do apps "right", and provide a pile of machinery [which I don't think would be all that hard] to make dealing with setting up, tuning, and running 'securely' simpler, and so Symantec and McAfee thrive on MS's oversights. But back to amazing: The thing I find amazing isn't the software, which as I say is [to my view] barely that much better than some of the stuff I was using 30rs ago, but the *hardware*. The idea of terabyte hard drives and gigabit memories is mindblowing; that, and the advances in CPU power and display technology [both the displays and the video cards that drive them] and communication speeds, etc, IMO, is hugely more responsible for the "advances" than anything really "amazing" in the software realm. /Bernie\ -- Bernie Cosell Fantasy Farm Fibers mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Pearisburg, VA --> Too many people, too few sheep <-- -- ---------------------------------------- To Change your email Address for this list, send the following message: CHANGE WIN-HOME your_old_address your_new_address to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Note carefully that both old and new addresses are required.
