From: Guru George (gurugeorge@sugarland.idiscover.co.uk)
Date: Fri Jul 11 1997 - 20:22:28 MDT
On Fri, 11 Jul 1997 15:41:48 PDT
"Bobby Whalen" <organix@hotmail.com> wrote:
>Guru George writes:
>
>>Aren't you contradicting yourself here? In fact, advances in software
>>possibilities drive advances in hardware, and advances in hardware
>drive
>>advances in software. Both ways, it's a good thing on the whole.
>
>I never said advances in hardware drive advances in software only the
>other way around. Each new version of a Microsoft package requires
>faster processors with more memory. As to weather these newer versions
>are better than the old is very debatable. More features is not
>necessarily better software design.
I may have misunderstood you. I thought you were talking about the computer
industry as a whole, hardware+software.
'Better' is up to the buyers of the software to decide.
But anyway, advances in hardware do drive advances in software,
particularly in games. Obviously, the more the hardware can do, the more
software designers will exploit it (if they think they can make money
doing so).
>>I''ve got no more than an ordinary end-users smattering of knowledge of
>>computers, but it seems to me that despite its faults, Win95 is a
>>definite advance on Win 3.1 in terms of ease of use, speed of running
>>programs, and multitasking capability. I *have* spent the occasional
>>day or two tearing my hair out over some problem, but then I expected
>>that when I got a computer, because the need for
>backwards-compatibility
>>and the many different manufacturers of ever snazzier hardware and
>>software having slightly different standards means that there will *
>>always* be problems. In fact come to think of it, most of the
>>complaints of the kind you make seem to forget that a lot of the reason
>>for Win95's 'bloatedness' is caused by these things, plus the
>requirement
>>that the PC ought to be operatable by even relatively stupid people.
>>This last requirement is never quite fulfillable, of course, precisely
>>because it requires a bloated, complex program that is prone to the
>>occasional problem! :-)
>
>I've been using both Windows and Mac-Based platforms for years. During
>a 2 month period my company kept track of productivity comparisions
>between the two platforms. The results were devastating to the Wintel
>Platform - every time a Mac crashed, the Wintel equivalent crashed 6
>times!
Isn't that more to do with the hardware side? In that Macs are designed
as a whole? But perhaps we should stop this computer talk, as it's
constantly being done to death on just about every newsgroup and mailing
list! :-)
>>A piss test for taking a job is the employer's privilege. That is
>>completely different from govt., because the govt. in no way *owns* the
>>country.
>>
>I'm not sure I quite follow you here. The government *owns* the country
>in all sorts of ways.
Living in a country isn't like having a job. The government may own
bits of land, but it isn't the owner of the right to live in that
country in the same way as the company is the owner of the right to say
who shall and shall not work for it.
>>Also, the bigger operator is still losing money if s/he undercuts; the
>>bigger s/he is the more money they lose, so in the *long run*, such
>>monopolies are unsustainable.
>
>Please see my previos post in this regard. Rockefeller only lowered
>prices on gas where he was opening new stations. This hardly put a dent
>in his pocket.
>
See posts now coming from others on this, esp John Clark's re. the
economics of it. I remember reading a few contemporary quotes somewhere
>from some of the people who exploited this tactic of Rockefeller's to
make money themselves that were quite funny.
But my point stands: that sort of thing may be morally wrong, nasty, etc.,
but it's not coercion, and it doesn't stop progress as a whole (not as
much as coercive government measures to stop it do - precisely because
they are coercive and unjust in the strict sense).
Guru George
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