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Letters: Eat Yourself Fitter with a Vulture Diet

Our State of the Carrion address

Roundup The Letters Page hasn't been cancelled, it's just been buried under an avalanche of er, .... Letters.

Which is the same as being unable to see the wood for the trees, I guess. (Although this is a phrase that has always caused me immense problems:- a recursive idiom with no apparent stop condition. )

Enough already. Here are a few of the recent weeks' highlights.

"Would you mind giving my thanks to the person from Lichtenstein who contributed the Seattlement terminology," Henry Keultjes of Ohio reminds us.

Not at all Henry. Lots of people seem to like that one.

Concerned that I hadn't enjoyed myself enought at MacWorld Expo in San Francisco, Daniel Bickhart recommended, "maybe you should try naturism... at least you'd really know how to really have fun!"

In the fall-out of my Aquaphobia, Danny P Zumwalt dispatched three emails on the subject of OS X, one of which suggested this new qualification for journalists:-

"... and if you think it isn't better than ANY other OS out there now, why are you writing about it? "

Quite right Danny. Time for all good men to come to the aid of the party! Your Aqua correspondence continues here, and despite an urgent need for new fresh flamage, hands down wins FoTW. Read on for our latest Flame for January: "i am going to stop comming to your gay site".

But we don't just letters from freaky Macintosh weirdos. We get them from freaky Linux and CDMA weirdos too:-

"Are you a Moron?" asks John Bowes.

That depends, John.

"You write: 'The fact that Ericsson and Nokia had both pioneered CDMA work themselves
was swept under the carpet.'," he continues.

"Stupid, NOK can't develop a ASIC chip to wrap their pretty plastic around to save their lives. As for ERICY, well, they capitulated to QCOM back in
April 99. There's not enough time left in the day to correct the rest of your garbage."

And Jørgen Spangen's email was so bizarre I've decided to start a new letters feature in its honour: "The Confused Lounge". This irregular companion to the equally irregular, but very popular Flame of the Week feature begins this week. Jørgen has set a high standard with his rumination on the mooted AOL-Red Hat merger: do RH matters?

Almost worthy for consideration in the Lounge, was this letter:-

"You 'quite deliberately' bought 'the piss-poorest laptop computer ever built' that was 'specifically designed to run Windows' then bitch and
moan that it wouldn't do what it wasn't designed to do and then have the balls to call Compaq 'damnable cheap bastards'"," cusses our reader.

A propos of nothing (well, apropos of Verity Stob's ancient history of Borland, actually) Shawn Johnston reminds us that carbon dating "won't really work for anything post 1945 as nuclear testing has messed up the ratios of isotopes carbon dating works on".

Sorr-eee!

Several of you have suggestions for our SGI patent prize: with a number of great minds to several of you for suggesting our tasteful Register shirts.

Although more in sorrow than etc, Lewis Fotti writes:-

"In your article, 'SGI shoots the messenger;, you asked for suggestions as to how to recognise the achievements of such companies.

"How about a "It's death Jim, but not as we know it" award (with thanks to Dr McCoy for the inspiration) for companies that sell their birth right to a
rival to stave off something awful but probably inevitable, in this case probably going bust. It's a shame really, SGI was once a really inovative
company but they tried to move from their core expertise of high performance graphics to general purpose supplier and never achieved the necessary scale."

Almost finally, about 300 hundred of you wrote in earlier this month to share you enjoyment of the Not-Google AIMSearchprank. The site has closed, and if you're not sated by this week's letter avalanche, there were many gems submitted to the site's creators for you to enjoy.

Finally, the most enjoyable letter of the month was this one, in referrence to John Lettice's dogged pursuit of the real XP sales figures:-

Mr. Lettice, Sir;

Please, Sir, I pray you do not ever discontinue publishing stories about increasing Windows XP sales.

As I spend more and more time on the fall-away side of 50 years of age and rooted in this wheelchair, I find my expanding waistline a cause for concern bordering on disgust. The plain fact is that, except for the long hair, I am starting to look like a Texan. (Shame, shame on me.)

Your repeated stories about how XP is rapidly becoming prevalent and so making B. Gates richer are the only true deterrent to my healthy appetite that has so far curbed my urge to eat more than the need for survival dictates.

So keep it up, please. Keep publishing those sales figures, concentrating on the inflated ones, if you would be so kind. Why, if this thing lives up to Bill's expectations, I may even become ill enough to lose some of this excess.

Thanks,
Jack Imsdahl

Other letters in this postbag...-
Introducing The Confused Lounge...
FoTW: "i am going to stop comming to your gay site"
Greene 'Lame and rather unknowledgeable Linux wannabee
Windows now "friendlier than the Mac" - The Aqua Letters

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