On Monday 17 March 2003 06:23, Pigeon wrote: > On Sun, Mar 16, 2003 at 03:05:57AM -0800, Paul Johnson wrote: > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > > Hash: SHA1 > > > > On Sun, Mar 16, 2003 at 10:29:42AM +1200, cr wrote: > > > Agreed, but unfortunately there's all this spurious 'compatible' crap. > > > Nobody was ever scared off buying a GM car because it wasn't > > > 'Ford-compatible'. > > > > Really? So that's why you see so many government issue vehicles that > > aren't a Ford Crown Victoria or a Chevrolet Impala, or if it's been on > > the road for a while, a Fordrolet Crown Impala. There's not a whole > > lot that can't be exchanged between those two on most model years. > > Well, the analogy works better wrt British Fords and GMs. Over here, > one can proverbially assemble any set of Ford running gear into any > Ford bodyshell. So you can take the guts out of your 1300 Escort and > fit a Capri V6 and the overdrive gearbox out of a Transit van, and it > all just bolts together. You can play similar games within the > British/Vauxhall and German/Opel GM lines. But you can't put GM bits > in a Ford, or vide versa. > > But as far as most drivers are concerned, Fords and GMs are > compatible. The steering wheel, pedals etc are all in the same > relative positions and work the same way. If you were to make a car > with even slightly different controls - like a different gearshift > pattern - nobody would buy it. > > Pigeon
Well, to take the analogy back to Linux - vs - Windoze - all word processors work pretty much the same. All spreadsheets work pretty much the same. The difference between M$Word and AbiWord, or Excel and Gnumeric, is no greater than than the difference between Win95 and W2K versions of M$Word / Excel. Just like hopping out of an Escort into a Vauxhall. But Windoze users won't believe that. They imagine anything but the M$ crudware they're accustomed to will be 'too difficult'. cr -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
