[Air-l] Re: Air-l digest, Vol 1 #443 - 3 msgs

[pmg at gmx.co.uk]

wowwww! coming from the backward isle of britain was not the 
least put out by receiving the odd page of gobbledy-gook. and 
speaking of ethics (which i believe we were) it ain't nice to 
extrapolate the universe from your own front-room. taking the 
issues one-by-one:

1.  some of my best friends use non-html email clients. this is 
because (a) the simpler (text) formats and clients don't carry or 
execute nasty scripty bugs; (b) for ppl in locations with shit 
bandwidth you can nip out for a smoke whilst you wait for even a 
plain-text email to download. . . at anything up to £1 or more per 
minute in some places! 

2. Many of us around the world hate microsoft. really, we do! we 
hate them. (a) they're rich, arrogant, corrupt, and western-centric; 
(b) they make every effort to kill off any competition to their 
running system (ie are actively preventing better and cheaper kit 
from coming onto the market) and keeping the internet largely an 
american enclave. 

the product itself is crud. i have microsoft premium office with a 
full version of outlook and MSIE6 on my puter and i have enough 
power to run them. i don't however. i run MS stuff at work, cos i 
work a lot with americans who enforce their standard environment 
on us. at home, i use pegasus as my email client (thank god, cos it 
doesn't execute vbs or java bugs written for MS products & i don't 
have to keep cleaning the latest bugs that can evade or disable my 
security off my system. pegasus can read html, but i never send in 
html (except at work) cos i consider it bad practice to send email 
formats that ppl can't use. i would only send html if i already know 
the recipient can process it (and if the html format were crucial to 
the content of the email, which rarely happens). 

i use the opera browser instead of MSIE. it is (a) 10 times faster, 
(b) eats a fraction of the ram, (c) works better with dreamweaver, 
(d) doesn't take the whole damned windows system with it when it 
crashes, (e) has a broader range of functions, (f) doesn't have 
MSIE's security problems and i don't have to spend my life 
patching the blasted thing, (g) processes java script correctly; (h) 
the software, plugins, and upgrades download in a fraction of the 
time (like up to 6 hours to download IE5 or better on a diallup 
connection -- jeez are they getting a backhander from the phone 
co?); and (i) it's share/freeware!

3. well, we in britain almost all still have dialup networking 
connections at home. this is because domestic broadband services 
were only rolled out this year because BT (our very own microsoft-
minded corporation) has hitherto succeeded in preventing it; and 
(a) mostly it still doesn't work properly, (b) is a technical challenge 
to instal, taking a reasonably computer literate person a minimum 
of an entire day of swearing to get working whilst reducing the 
minimally-literate to impotent tears, and (c) still pretty expensive. 
points east of here, it's  largely not available for domestic use or so 
expensive in relation to per capita income that ppl most couldn't 
begin to afford it (or the phone lines are so poor quality it won't 
function). pardon us for being poor! 

4. don't use my PDA for email cos it's too bloody expensive!

Well, you did ask . . . 
Paula


 

On 18 Jul 2002 at 12:00, air-l-request at aoir.org wrote:

There are people who still use...
1) non-HTML email clients
2) non-Microsoft products
3) dial-up phone lines
4) PDAs for email

please be careful what you post, messages like the above are as 
bad as
SPAM.