Re: Boycott Microsoft

[Jeremy Crabtree <crc3419@delphi.com>]

Travis Morien wrote:
> 
> : Interesting...a moral defense for an immoral corporation...
> 
> You putting Microsoft in the same league as the industrials who dump waste
> into our rivers?  Or a cigarette company?

Certainly not. But that does not mean that they are "moral" because they don't go
dumping sewage and toxic waste. Look at the way they are deroying the indutsry
and the lives of so many involved with it through never ending crusade to control
everything (in the industry).

> 
> There are immoral companies out there, but as far as I am concerned, MSFT
> is just an aggressive company using standard business tactics to win
> profits, and they do do without killing anyone or creating physical
> damage.

If they were using "standard" business practices they would not be where they are
today. I have looked into the issue, read the research and the articles and I
have come to the conclusion that their tactics are downright wrong.

> 
> Netscape hangs my computer less than IE4, so I use netscape, but there are
> no PC OS's better than Win95 (or NT or whatever).

You mean to say that you *personally* have never used an OS better than Win95.
There are indeed OSes better than Win95/NT, for example Free/NET/Open BSD, Linux,
OS/2, and others.

>  Win95 runs just fine on
> my new Pentium 2 300 with 128M of RAM.  It cost me under three grand (and
> that is with 17" monitor, 3Dfx card, AWE 64 sound, 4.3G Quantum Fireball
> HDD, 32x CD-rom....  computers are cheap

I'll say, but look what you could have gotten for $800 less (though, it'll be a
bit less of a savings when you factor in the cost of a monitor, soundcard
($40-ish), and Modem ($60-ish I think))

533 MHz Digital Alpha 21164PC CPU  
Digital PC164SX Motherboard w/1MB cache  
64 MB Synchronous DRAM   
6.4 GB Western Digital Hard Drive (EIDE)  
Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro ...OpenGL Graphics Accelerator w/8 MB SGRAM  
32x Toshiba CD-ROM (EIDE)  
120MB LS-120 SuperDisk   
ATX Mid-Tower Case w/ 8 Drive Bays  
300 Watt Power Supply  
104-Keyboard / Microsoft Mouse  
Windows NT 4.0 Workstation  

(I would assume you should be able to order it without WinNT should you so
desire, but I don't for sure as I have not checked into it)

Wright Design 1.0   
Digital FX!32 Binary Translator  
3-Year Limited Warranty 


>, and getting cheaper so fast that
> my best quote on a computer was $50 cheaper this week than last week for
> the same system, because each of the componants went down a few bucks.
>


You (as a programmer) don't magically gain the right to write bloated, slow,
inefficient code just because hardware is getting cheaper; to suggest you do is a
cop-out.
 
> Stop winging about Win95 being slow when computers are so fast!

It should take that much hardware to run it, and apparently you don't get why.
Considered there are OSes that can do MUCH more on MUCH less hardware. Also,
consider not everybody is running a PII 300 on their desk. 
(I read that the ideal amoutn of RAM for win95 is between 64-256Mb)

> 
> Say what you want about Win 3.XX and older MSFT products, they were
> absolute crap.  But Win95 is 1000x better than TSRs!

What do TSRs have to do with Windows? You do know that TSRs still exist in Win95,
in fact some hardware won't function without them. (Don't even try to flame me
here, I have a scanner that is solid proof of this, even with the Win95 driver it
needs the DOS TSR to work) I smell fish, perhaps a red herring?

-- 
Vive Macintosh, all hail OS/2, Long live the Amiga, UNIX forever, umm,
and all the other systems I didn't mention. We all compute differently,
get over it.                                          Jeremy Crabtree