Re: PHYS_L COURTESY

[Doug Craigen <dcc@ESCAPE.CA>]

Leigh Palmer wrote:
> Anyone who thinks newer to be synonymous with better has the Gates
> disease. Anybody else here still using Word 5.1 for the Mac instead
> of later versions (e.g. Word 98)? Many Macpersons have an older
> form of the disease, compulsive updating syndrome. There are even
> Mac applications that have no other purpose than to go out to the
> internet to find out if a later version of every application on
> the machine exists! Does that happen to the Windows crowd as well?
> It is pretty silly, in my opinion, to upgrade for no good reason.

The assumption that the latest is the best is pretty all-pervasive in
our society and how we treat computers is no exception.  The only
possible exception I've seen makes me sound like a broken record: Linux
users tend to look at a computer and decide what would be a good way to
use it, then install the appropriate modules.  So depending on the
computer and organization, it may become a network printserver, a
firewall, an Xterminal...

One of the major things I do to "upgrade" people's computers is to bring
them back to software versions which make sense for their hardware.
Anecdotes about, but here's an example... a friend was having trouble
giving documents to his secretary because she uses WordPerfect 8 and he
just had Windows 3.1 and no version of WordPerfect.  Somebody else came
in and provided him with a recent WordPerfect and Windows 95 so that it
could run.  He now had 10 M of hard disk left and his 33 MHz machine now
crawled along at an agonizing pace.  So I went in and upgraded him back
to where he started - now the machine was running reasonably - and
showed him how to use the free "write" program which enabled him to do
all the pre-secretary formatting he wanted and the secretary can import
his files with no problem.

One thing that has really amused me is following the guide IE 5.5
"upgrade" advice at <http://windows.about.com>.  Bear in mind that this
is a Windows enthusiast.  Since IE 5.5 he has been running sections of
his site where people can list their installation problems and search
for solutions.  He has finally given up.  In the last week he has posted
instructions for how to recover the functionality of you computer (this
beast can be a real killer for some people's computers) by going back to
5.0.

\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\

Doug Craigen
          http://www.dctech.com/physics/about_dc.html