Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 559.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2003 08:01:50 +0000
From: Norman Hinton <hinton@springnet1.com>
Subject: Re: 16.558 success forgets: premature senescence of equipment
Well, this may work some of the time, but for much software, the
manufacturers prevent you from hanging on to material -- I just tried to
get an answer from a vendor about some 3-years-old OCR software, and was
told that it is now regarded as "classic" and that they would no longer
answer questions about it. Then they offered me an upgrade for $79.95 plus
shipping.
This is most annoying but of course I had very little choice. I once
ignored a similar ploy from Norton and within a week I was wiped out by a
virus I could not get a defense against unless I paid $99.00 for the
'upgrade'. It gets one's attention.
>It would serve most of us well to really consider if we do need to
>"updgrade" and then decide if compatibility is really an issue. Microsoft
>makes most of its sales on this fear of incompatibility, but often this is
>an unwarranted fear. Most word processors do the trick for the documents I
>need to produce, and they all save in text and RTF format, so I stick with
>my trusty BBEdit. But it is really hard to convince some people that they
>wont be "behind the curve" if they don't upgrade.
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