[or-roots] Re: Or-roots and AOL - I was wrong!

[Bill & Chris Strickland]

Walt wants you to join the rest of the lemmings and march off into the
sea, I suppose.

I have a differing point of view. If it works for you, why update just
for the sake of having the "newest stuff". Not everyone has the
financial resources to stay up with the Joneses, or maybe they choose to
spend those resources in a more wise manner than a fruitless quest to
stay on top of the bubble, ala Enron.

Interesting to note that it doesn't cost anything to upgrade to a 32-bit
processor and 100 Gig Hard drive (to run that "free" software) -- is
Walt volunteering to buy all us Dark Agers a new 1.8 Pentium 4
multi-processor box, just to stay up with the Joneses? Anything less and
by tommorrow you'd be back in the Dark Ages. And what about Mac users
that don't have quite the vast array of "free" downloads (especially at
microsoft.com)?

Not everyone online lives in the good ol' USA. There are a lot of Third
World genealogists struggling along with your old cast-off computers,
Walt. PAF (dos) is still the most widely used genealogy program in the
world, and it doesn't even require Windows or a Pentium to run. 

As for those long downloads, you better have a very good firewall -- is
there a question as to why many criminals do their work at night?

The bottom line is lowest common denominator compatability (plain text)
is compatable with the most users. Save your HTML mail for private
correspondence with known associates who appreciate it and don't try to
impose your standards on everyone else. They might not appreciate it.

Bill Strickland
Oregon City

DaviesWalt at cs.com wrote:
> 
> I always wonder why some people want the rest of us to live in the
> dark ages.  Folks we have moved beyound the old drab days of plain
> text it doesn't cost anything to update your system to except the new
> formats so why should we bend over backward to please a few who won't
> update their systems.
> Get with rest of us folks, go online and download the latest software.
> Its easy real easy and its free, FREE I said.
> Go to www.download.com or www.microsoft.com or www.netscape.com and
> get the free software and enjoy the new look. 
> ...