| Wednesday,
July 28, 1999 Guy Kawasaki used to do guerilla marketing,
encouraging Apple enthusiasts to mail bomb journalists who said anything
about Apple that wasn't fulsome praise. Apparently the linux people are
working on the same principle. With Apple the result as that many
journalists decided it was too painful to write about Apple at all. You
couldn't tell the truth warts and all without being subjected to abuse,
and there is so much more to write about, why bother?
Look: I am weary of getting the same letter, clearly written by someone
else, telling me that it's not Netscape's fault that their installation
system sucks dead bunnies, it's Microsoft's fault that NT is such a rotten
operating system; this from people who clearly haven't thought much about
the situation, and most of whom didn't bother to read the article, but
were sent a headline and maybe a one sentence summary of what I said. Most
are about as literate and polite as the letter I printed. Incidentally,
one of them sent a letter saying he would like to apologize. Alas he
didn't manage to do it, just would like to, after which he had more abuse
to heap my way. Charming.
Look: perhaps I was overly colorful in saying that Real Audio
"blows up" NT. What it does when run on startup is to grab so
many resources that NT slows to a crawl. I suspect that if I waited long
enough, say half an hour, things would be somewhat digested and it would
all operate but very slowly. Maybe. That still wouldn't help Netscape's
automatic installation which won't work if Netscape is running, but which
doesn't tell you that, nor tell you that you must shut down Netscape
(which you used to download the program in the first place) in order to
install the upgrade; even though the upgrade install was launched when you
finished downloading.
I see I was not as clear as I might have been: I did manage to download
the upgrade without the auto-install (and indeed one of the points of the
column was that you must do that). I thought that was implied when I said
that eventually I ran the install from a clean restart of NT without
Netscape running; but I agree that if you read that quickly you might not
infer what I implied. Whether an operating system ought to forbid an
installation program from grabbing resources is a matter for debate.
Perhaps so, but guarding against ill-behaved installation procedures is
never easy. Recall that OS/2 could be brought to its knees by overflowing
the single input queue, and even with Watchcat, a third-party background
application that slowed the entire system you were not always safe.
I get the distinct impression that the current campaign is being
conducted through use of people who aren't familiar with my work, and who
think I have never been hard on Microsoft. More than one have accused me
of owning stock in Microsoft. Interesting. Is Netscape employing a
coordinator of guerrilla marketing? In any event, I fear I am going to
ignore most of the balance of the comments about this particular section
of this particular column.
===
<stickel@tstickel.keck.hawaii.edu>... Host unknown
(Name server: tstickel.keck.hawaii.edu: host not found)
<mcmicken@ix10.ix.netcom.com>... Deferred:
Connection refused by ixsrs1.ix.netcom.com.
===
For those who could not find Startup Manager, I
went to Yahoo, typed Startup Manager Gaffers, and the first item was
http://members.aye.net/cgi-bin/dfs_components.cgi?fw_startupmanager
which seems to be where I got it. I thought I had included that in the
original article, but I must not have.
May the force be with you. Or should it? I find
that my pages require FREQUENT refreshing since I work on them at odd
times; and if one doesn't refresh currentmail and currentview often one
may well miss what's there. Even I find I forget to do it when looking on
line for a test.
(1) Is there a command to put in a page header that forces a reload,
and (2) is that a good thing to do when it's pretty often needed? I think
I would hate it myself.
OK, I find there is such a command, and overwhelmingly the mail is that
I shouldn't bother, which is the way I feel too. I have in the template
for new currentmail and currentview pages put in a warning to refresh
early and often. Alas, f5 works only with IE, or at least that's what I
have found; with Netscape you must push the reload button. I probably have
forgotten something; I confess I use Netscape now only to be sure the site
looks right with that as well as Explorer..
NSI MUST DIE!
is Robert
Bruce Thompson's new campaign. I confess I am getting some sympathy for
the view as I have more experience with them...
Anyway, enough for the day. I have work to do.
NSI must die! is getting to be my campaign as well. They do not respond
to mail other than with automated messages that do not tell you what to
do. Visiting their sites tells you nothing. There are no human beings at
NSI, and their programs do not communicate. Apparently you must have
telepathic communications with them to accomplish anything sensible. The
information their rejections messages send is CLEARLY INCORRECT but there
is nothing you can do.
NSI is not doing the job it is being paid to do, and apparently does
not care. Typical monopoly with no competition. The monopoly must be
eliminated, and soon. It will be the only way to get their attention.
TOP
|
CLICK HERE for
a Special Request. 
