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Re: [LUG] (Another rant) [Fwd: Microsoft shuts down Windows 98]

 

Blimey. I missed a real fight here, didn't I?

For what it's worth, I'll offer my 2 cents worth (from Manhattan, no
less) on this.

Is Microsoft evil? No more evil than *any* proprietary software
company, and even then, that's not evil - that's just them doing
something I disagree with (proprietary software)

I was a DOS/Windows developer for some years, supporting applications
written in QBasic, Visual Basic 3 (and later 6) and then moved to
writing web apps in ASP with VBScript. It was annoying, and something
of a pain, and sometimes stuff would crash, but really wasn't all that
bad. The database I was using for my web apps sucked, but Access isn't
meant for such things.

These days, I write web apps in Ruby on Rails (with MySQL 5) and
things are a little better, but I still get stupid error messages and
very often they're my own fault.

I remember when IE6 came out, it was wonderful. Stuff that just
couldn't be done before, could be done. It helped drive the web
forwards... 5 years later, and we've got standards compliant free
software browsers, and it's a pain that IE6 hasn't caught up, however,
most of its problems are well known and there are known workarounds
for them. Yeah, it sucks, but not supporting IE6 is kinda stupid.

If you support free software and you support GNU/Linux, then the best
thing you can do is to tell other people about the freedoms they can
get by using free software. Help people to install a free operating
system on their computer, that'd be much better than telling them to
stick with Windows 98, or if the web is your thing, help make the
DCGLUG website better and more standards compliant, or you know.. go
outside and drink beer in the sunshine.

matt

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