kevinmcl@magma.ca wrote:
On Monday 14 October 2002 19:17, Anders Johansson wrote:
kevinmcl@magma.ca wrote:
They did it that way because it worked.
They also use MS Outlook and make up for its shortcomings by
spending
literally millions of $$$ on anti virus software. "because it
worked" or
"because it required the least amount of thought or competence"?
Well, I suppose that's very true. I have been trying for a while, and I still do not have sufficient competence to completely abandon MS Windows and MS Office.
Hm. I think you may have misunderstood me. I mentioned the use of MS Outlook because I thought it was a striking exampel of extraordinarily poor business sense. You mention features, a few of which exist in open software, a few don't and most can't interoperate with MS software because MS uses secret file formats. This is true, if you were to switch to open software today you would have to lose a few features. I put it to you that these features aren't worth all the extra money you're spending today on MS software. Not good business sense. I then wondered if, given this lack of business sense, their use of top posting was really because it worked, or because top posting required the least amount of work from the user. I did not mean using windows required the least amount of competence.
The network proved to have utility for those reasons and for other reasons, so it gradually expanded to include other institutions of higher learning. Then, it just sat there for a while, with not a whole lot of improvement, until business came along.
The www was invented at CERN before business came along. Since
then
there have been a precious few new inventions. It's mostly been
just
polish since then.
And I knew that. But Mr. Hatton's remark (sorry again, Carl) as quoted, said "the internet"... not "the web". But, I guess as long as you get the attribution correct, you don't need to address the actual quotation? This netiquette is slippery stuff.
Last time I checked the www was a part of the internet. I mentioned it as an example of an improvement (and quite a large one at that) that came before business entered the picture. Or were you talking about the TCP/IP protocol stack? If so, which particular improvements have we seen since business came into it? ICANN? Anders