»Q« said:
You are not merely an non-MS basher, Alan. You insistence that
Blinky is the cause of anti-MS sentiment is absurd, as is your
continued insistence that you merely provide facts about MS products.
Insistence? Well I wrote it once anyway. It was intended to have a
tongue-in-cheek flavour, similar to Blinkered's incessant little digs
and jibes did. Perhaps I should have added a smiley at the end the way
Blinkered often did, in an attempt to take the curse off it. If so,
consider it Blinkeredly smileyed. Me providing facts is in the context
of countering the spin and hype peddled by the MS bashers - I didn't
mean to suggest that it was my only input on the issue though, because
it's not. What's also "not" is me ever recommending that someone
*obtain* a MS product to do any sort of task mentioned here... let alone
ever worshipping one, or whatever such nonsense I'm accused of by the
likes of JF (never being able to cite a case of it though, despite the
footer I now apply as a standard to his pathetic posts).
You label people MS bashers far too readily, tarring with a very
broad brush, and you attack them with ad hominem repeatedly.
Again, some of this is done to show the genuine bashers just how
annoying and ridiculous such ad hom behaviour can be. Clearly it shows
it to be just that - maybe they'll take the hint one day. But as for
"tarring with a very broad brush", I'd have to disagree. Have a look at
this thread. Someone asks about some freeware availability and they get
a reply that's of no help at all, telling them not to use a piece of
software they have, with no qualification, and a sig that clearly
indicates their POV. Add this to their track record of trying to pass
off the ability to open Windows Notepad as a major security hole (to
mention just one example) and I'd say they've managed to tar themselves
with their own brush, and they make no secret of it; proud of it in
fact. That's fair enough - they can be whatever they wish to be, but
they'll also reap what they sow. If they choose to peddle hype & spin
then they'll be shot down accordingly and labelled appropriately.
One reason people object to the use of OE to post to Usenet is the
horrible way it misformats quoted text. This bug causes OE to send a
lot of posts which are very annoying to read, and by itself this bug
is enough to justify the recommendation not to use OE for Usenet
posting. Recommending third-party add-ons to correct the extremely
poor formatting of OE sometimes helps, but frequently just leads to
OE users finding further ways to misformat their posts.
Now, if instead, someone had replied with some legitimate information
such as you have supplied above (which I agree with as factual) then
that would have been a different story. And just to make my own POV
clearer, you clearly don't view any MS product with any degree of
affection (to put it mildly
) but when you level a critisism it's
always accompanied with something factual. Even though I might not agree
with the conclusions you draw from it, I wouldn't put you in the class
of a basher, any more than I would class myself as a worshipper.
That's pretty lousy advice. Usenet posts are carried to readers
around the world, and users should try to choose software that
generates readable messages.
I'd agree that OE has many shortcomings when it comes to NG posting**,
but I'm of the opinion that there are far greater contributors to poor
readability of NG threads, mainly the results of the posters themselves.
It's all very well to focus on the imperfections of the tools, but in
the case of NGs, this is grossly overshadowed by the ineptitude of the
posters. I've seen plently of complete messes posted using XNews or
Agent. So I think the more important advice would be to learn *how* to
post/ write in many cases. (Just an opinion)
** I'll say 3 Hail Bills for that later... not.