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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bob Duncan who wrote (16712)	2/22/1999 8:44:00 PM
From: nommedeguerre	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Bob, >>Windows 98 only has "trouble" with strange mixes of legacy and cutting edge hardware. Where were you when we were told we couldn't run two independent ethernet cards on a brand-new Gateway WindowsNT workstation. Good thing we had a 5-year old Sun Sparc 5 to handle this "strange" mix. Cheers, Norm

To: Bob Duncan who wrote (16712)	2/23/1999 5:15:00 AM
From: Hal Rubel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Plug-and-Play RE: "Windows falls a bit short in the plug and play arena. If you stick in something as simple as a floppy disk, nothing happens. The Windows OS is too stupid to know what to do with it... Hal, what are you talking about? My floppy was detected just fine when I had it replaced. Are you sure you plugged the power connection into the drive? Please do not post garbage like this. Windows 98 only has "trouble" with strange mixes of legacy and cutting edge hardware. Unless you were plugging in a 360K Floppy or something bizzare from the early 80's I do not see how the floppy was not detected." Duncan: Detection alone is just not good enough. Every Wintel machine I have ever used over the last 6 years fails to respond to a floppy. I have to actually make it show up by hunting it down by its port address ( usually "C") and activate it manually in order to access its contents. This sounds stupid to me and I don't think its the drives. I think it is the Microsoft OS. Why should the user need to know how a computer's ports are wired internally? You stick a floppy into a Mac and bingo, there it is on the desktop, no mater the skill of the user. This particular lack of innovation has been going on at MSFT for almost 15 years. You don't stick a floppy into a machine to hide it. You stick a floppy into a machine to access it. The Wintel system's failure to actively respond to the introduction of something as elementary as a floppy is quite numb. Considering that the Windows OS is carefully designed to act this way, I choose to use the word "stupid". Dumbing-down the OS so as not to frighten off computer-nerds is not what I call progress. In my mind, plug-and-play implies some minimal degree of user transparency especially with basic functions. You stick a floppy in a computer, it ought to pop up on the screen, plain and simple. Hal PS: IMHO, there is nothing wrong about knowing something about computer construction or programming. However, the bottom line here is that, just like cars and TVs, you should not need to know anything about computers in order to get basic use out of one. This is especially so for computers. After all, they are called "computers", right?! ;-)