[Air-l] Re: Air-l digest, Vol 1 #443 - 3 msgs
pmg at gmx.co.uk
pmg at gmx.co.uk
Sat Jul 20 04:38:59 PDT 2002
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.
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