Re: the Bill is overdue

[Rick Tarara <rbtarara@SPRYNET.COM>]

Enough with the g** d*** Microsoft bashing.  Nobody ever got a virus by
reading their email--only by foolishly opening an attachment that came from
somebody they didn't know.

Mr. Bill probably saved the Mac from oblivion by porting Office to the Mac
since Claris was not going to make it in the business place or on most
campuses.

And it has NOT been Microsoft that obsoletes old software between versions
of their OS--look to Jobs et. al. for that distinction.  M$ has bent over
backwards to keep the whole Win9.x series backward compatible so that people
could still run version 1.0 of 123!  People then severely criticized M$ for
still running on a DOS shell, or still having the guts of a 16-bit system,
but of course those same people now scream that XP doesn't run their 10 year
old DOS games!

The bottom line--leave the OS bashing alone.  Microsoft and Apple (and
others) have good points and bad points.  If there were a half-billion Macs
out there, the virus writers would be attacking them.  I use both Windows
and  Mac systems and personally prefer Windows (contrary to one often seen
tag-line) but at this point see little difference between them.  However, it
seems ironic that people do attack M$ for producing the same kind of
integrated OS and software system (with some hardware integration by
cooperating [or conspiring] with Intel) that everyone initially praised
Apple for doing.

It's late, but let's just NOT get into yet another OS pi**ing match.

Rick

*************************************************
Richard W. Tarara
Professor of Physics
Saint Mary's College
Notre Dame, IN 46556
219-284-4664
rtarara@saintmarys.edu

FREE PHYSICS INSTRUCTIONAL SOFTWARE
www.saintmarys.edu/~rtarara/software.html
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----- Original Message -----
From: "John S. Denker" <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>
To: <PHYS-L@lists.nau.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, May 22, 2002 10:21 PM
Subject: the Bill is overdue


> John Clement wrote:
> > ...[don't] be too hard on Bill Gates,
>
> That's right, this is National Be-Kind-To-Psychopaths Week.
> Fear and loathing resumes next week.
>
> > as he is giving people
> > many of the features they say they need.
>
> We have the "feature" that the email system has become
> a medium for the replication and propagation of virsuses.
> Which users said they wanted that?
>
> > The fact that these features are
> > misused or that some users do can not handle the newer formats is not
really
> > his fault.
>
> Yeah, sure.  Users do foolish things like reading their email.
> For that they deserve to get their files ruined.  They deserve
> to waste a whole bunch of their time, and their friends' time.
> They deserve to lose all their privacy.
>
> > You are in the position of trying to loan a CD to a person who
> > only has an antique record player.  Both disks are round with a hole in
the
> > middle, but there are no universal players for both.  There are
universal
> > players for virtually all format E-mail messages.
>
> Helloooooo?  I thought Microsoft is the vendor that is known for a
> longstanding policy of systematically introducing incompatibilities,
> to force users to upgrade even when it is against their interests,
> and to place artificial burdens on competitors, again to the well-
> documented disadvantage of users.