Xceptional?
Jack Schofield (A hard sell for cuddly new XP, Online, September 20) celebrates Windows XP as an operating system that allows people to "log on separately and [keep] their stuff separate".
As if that weren't amazing enough, the new operating system allows users to "leave programs running while switching quickly between different identities".
We Linux users have been doing all that for 10 years. Schofield also hails XP as the bringer of a "brave new world where PCs... almost never crash". Big deal! Linux has been offering PC users a stable and crash-free operating system for many years.
Why do you think so many companies prefer Linux in mission-critical applications? And in the week that brought us the Nimda worm, which exploits the security flaws of Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Internet Information Server, it is odd that Schofield neglected to mention the single biggest concern that most computer professionals have with Microsoft operating systems.
Dr David Harper adh@sanger.ac.uk I was really spitting feathers when I read your XP article.
The death of DOS? The death of XP, hopefully! MS is giving us another interface. Microsoft seems to have the marketing department leading them around by the Prince Albert.
Non-savvy users never need know DOS is there, and indeed are often mystified by the black box's occasional appearance. So why remove it? To remove user control perhaps? I use DOS to automate many functions in my company's systems, and this means that effectively XP won't be able to run any legacy software.
How glad will the bosses be when they have to shell out to re-write bits and bobs that glue so many disparate legacy systems together? And a new mandatory interface? With, of all things, SKINS! Well that is just super! Have you ever tried guiding a user through a process over the phone?
"Click on the OK button, please." "I haven't got an OK button. But I do have a dog's head that I click occasionally that woofs! Isn't it great."
Try and support a system like that. I may just give up and go back to my first love, trench digging. You know where you are with a trench. In a trench. Not content with poking an animated paper clip at you every time you try to do some actual work, they are going to do more F*U*N stuff! With the CPU and memory that I spent shed loads on!
Look, I bought a fast machine to make it do stuff FAST. I want the whole processor beetling away on my problems, not lapdancing for me to make my mouse do somersaults. If you want fun, buy a Play- Station (they are quite good).
Businesses equate a more powerful CPU with greater task turnaround times. If XP is installed, and things suddenly start taking a lot longer on a higher CPU machine, people are going to ask questions In the real world, it is, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
However, Microsoft seems to be drifting into la-la land, a land of bells and whistles and precious little else. Good riddance to them, the abuse of monopoly has brought down similar companies in the past, and I will dance on marketing teams' redundancy notices when the whole thing goes pear. I hope you will only be left with this market of idiots, and all the wise old goats will be off to Red Hat to get their free, robust, open, stable, pinko-commie operating system.
I am off to buy a fluffy penguin and big fat RTF Manual, just like the 70s. Let's hope XP becomes known as Microsoft's last operating system, eXceptionally Poor.
Steve Hibbert
hiblet@yahoo.com
In your article on Windows XP, you claim that its "Noddy" has no alternative. Actually, if you go to Control Panel, System, Advanced, Performance, and select, "Adjust for best performance", Windows reverts to something almost indistinguishable from the Windows 98/2000 desktop. To "fix" the Start Menu, right click on it, select properties and select Classic Start menu.
Now you have all the functionality of XP with the interface you already know, and there is no argument for not upgrading to an OS that is 1,000 times more stable than the old 95 kernel.
Mike Gray
mikegray@btinternet.com
Web watchers
I too used the web to find out about what was going on in America last week. Some organisations did well: Reuters, Reuters via Yahoo news, BBC news, Telegraph, Ananova. They had the story, even though the BBC and Reuters reported that "six people" were thought dead. These organisations did less well: CNN was unavailable. New York Times on the web took most of the day to mention the story.
The Guardian initially thought it could make do with a hyperlink rather than remaking its front page. Moreover.com, NewsNow, NewsBlip and the other "news aggregators" were simply too slow. No wonder Online columnist Nick Denton turned to TV. The real answer proved to be net radio, which your reports didn't mention. Not all the news/talk stations listed in RealPlayer's radio tuner were accessible or reliable. But using local stations all over the States, you could hear every scrap of raw, unmediated rumour, gossip and official advice. The weblogs and boards are interesting, but local radio provides more sense of what the offline masses are hearing, thinking and feeling.
John Morrish
morrish@ntlworld.com
