Nuke Richmond

From: Richard Erlacher <edick_at_idcomm.com>
Date: Fri Jan 12 17:43:39 2001

Just keep in mind, that I've no axe to grind, except that I think the
discussion of LINUX is OT. After all, it's not 10 years old yet, right?

My real point is that there's no benefit to anyone in all this complaining.
People will decide what they prefer. Their reasons aren't always clear, but
they don't have to be. Microsoft products seem to meet the needs of the
masses, and that, in itself is a benefit to us all, since they (the masses)
are happy to buy millions of identical computers and try to make them do
what each of them wants.

Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave McGuire" <mcguire_at_neurotica.com>
To: <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Friday, January 12, 2001 11:19 AM
Subject: Re: Nuke Richmond


>
> Whew...sorry Richard, there's just so much flame bait in here I'm just
> going to pretend I didn't read it. And I'm not even a Linux fanatic.
>
> -Dave McGuire
>
> On January 12, Richard Erlacher wrote:
> > All these complaints about how things are won't fix a thing!
> >
> > If the LINUX community were interested in providing a service, that is,
a
> > service for anyone other than themselves, they'd have done the up-to-now
> > missing 90% of the work and cleaned up and documented their software.
> > Instead, you have a terrible mess of code with comments that hve been
> > irrelevant and incorrect for the last 25 revisions, yet nobody's been
> > willing to delete them. Generally, design and coding is about 2% of the
> > job, debugging is another 3%, cleanup is about 5% and thorough and
accurate
> > documentation is about 90.
> >
> > >From what I've seen so far, the LINUX community, though
well-intentioned,
> > has done little to provide tools useable by the masses.
> >
> > Instead of lighting that "one candle" they'd rather personalize their
> > frustration, resulting, BTW, from their own lack of application effort,
> > targeting Bill Gates, whose policies are really no different from those
of
> > any corporate leader. They're supposed to outdo the competition, trip
them
> > up, confound their efforts to acquire market share, and just generally
try
> > to do them in. Gates and Co have done well. What's more, for every
LINUX
> > user who's even remotely satisfied with what he has, there are thousands
of
> > Windows-users out there who love their OS. One difference, however, is
that
> > they (the Windows users) don't have to spend their lives stroking the OS
> > just to keep it alive.
> >
> > Dick
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "John Tinker" <jtinker_at_coin.org>
> > To: <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
> > Sent: Friday, January 12, 2001 7:25 AM
> > Subject: Re: Nuke Richmond
> >
> >
> > > "W.B.(Wim) Hofman" wrote:
> > >
> > > > Folks,
> > > >
> > > > Can you expect to say to a housewife : This is a Linux cd. Install
it on
> > > > this computer and I expect you to have looked at these Internet
sites by
> > > > tomorrow morning? It would have to be some housewife!! Linux needs
far
> > to
> > > > much work still to make it fit for the masses.
> > > >
> > > > Wim
> > >
> > > Don't forget the opportunity lost due to M$ predations. Gates didn't
> > invent
> > > software. He pulled the rug out from under a lot of good effort, using
> > > everyone else's work, but trying to protect his own. He poked his
finger
> > in
> > > the eye of standards wherever possible. Standard layers will be the
> > foundation
> > > of future system elaboration. The fundamental contradiction Gates had
to
> > get
> > > around, was that between "information age" and "proprietory software".
It
> > is
> > > the "rising tide lifts all boats" problem. What is the value of
wealth,
> > unless
> > > you are richer than the next guy? If everybody is rich, who will pick
up
> > the
> > > garbage? When people started passing around copies of his BASIC, Gates
> > > realized the problem, and the solution.
> > >
> > > -- John Tinker
> > >
> > >
> > >
>
>
Received on Fri Jan 12 2001 - 17:43:39 GMT