Registered: Mar 2000
Location: Richmond, VA, USA
Posts: 151

Actually, I'd rather you explain it to me. Exactly how did Bill Gates sabotage a competing software product?

As far as your malicious code question, I am not sure of the relevance. I would say throwing a brick through a window and writing a virus that deletes files off a hard drive both fall under the golden rule of philosophy: "do unto others as you would have others do unto you."

[This message has been edited by na2rboy (edited 06-12-2000).]

Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Baltimore MD, USA
Posts: 717

quote:

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Originally posted by na2rboy:
You could probably fill this page with links to editorials that do the same. It is hip to be anti-MS.

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Registered: Nov 1999
Location: Redwood City CA
Posts: 472

quote:

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Originally posted by na2rboy:
Actually, I'd rather you explain it to me. Exactly how did Bill Gates sabotage a competing software product?

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Registered: Sep 1999
Location: Texan in Calgary for a while
Posts: 1361

quote:

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Originally posted by Winchell:
That may very well be.
But, have you actually read the article in question?

I own a Wintel machine. The thought that I will no longer be given a Windows installation disk when I purchase a computer with Windows installed really makes me angry.[B]

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Registered: Mar 2000
Location: Richmond, VA, USA
Posts: 151

Gates wanted to disadvantage a competitor? Holy crap. What unfair business practices he has. If only that evil overlord would be nice to his competitors like the other multi-million/billion dollar companies out there.

As far as your interpretations:

1) Not socialist, but with a liberal view of monopolies. The federal appeals court in Washington has consistently sided with MS in these types of trials. Ronald Reagan/George Bush/Bill Clinton/whoever must have appointed fascist judges.

2)There is no reason for MS to claim it is forged. How many e-mails are exchanged in ANY company that deride competitors and try to come up with ways to push those competitors down while simultaneously pulling their own company up? I know it happens all the time where I work. Welcome to business practice in the US.

3)See above.

Winchell, yes I read the editorials. If you don't like the policy, show MS with your dollars that you don't. Until this policy has a detrimental effect on me, I am not going to get angry about it. Mr. Gripe Line and myself (and I would wager you, also) know very little about the specifics of MS's recovery CD/ partitioned backup plan. Judgement should probably be witheld until the specifics are known.

[This message has been edited by na2rboy (edited 06-13-2000).]

Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Baltimore MD, USA
Posts: 717

quote:

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Originally posted by na2rboy:
Winchell, yes I read the editorials. If you don't like the policy, show MS with your dollars that you don't. Until this policy has a detrimental effect on me, I am not going to get angry about it.

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Oh, I've already decided that my next computer will either be a Macintosh or a Linux box. Especially Linux, there is an appeal to an OS that comes with the source code, so you can custom re-program sections of it to your liking.

As far as "having a detrimental effect on me", I've already undergone a hard drive crash that would have left me with an unusable computer, had I not a Windows installation CD in my possession.

Be that as it may, time will tell if you can maintain your Microsoft anaxiphilia when you finally do run afoul of one of Mr. Gate's policies.

Registered: Mar 2000
Location: Richmond, VA, USA
Posts: 151

As a matter of fact, I have run "afoul" of one of the dreaded Mr. Gates' policies. I have installed MS Office 2000 three times on two computers. After the first two times, I had to call MS Support (the registration screens gave me the number, it was easy) and ask them to give me a code to install it a third time. But you know what? Who cares. I can sacrifice 3 minutes.

As far as your hard drive crash, do you know for a fact that MS's recover CD would not have worked?

Registered: Nov 1999
Location: Redwood City CA
Posts: 472

quote:

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Originally posted by na2rboy:
Gates wanted to disadvantage a competitor? Holy crap. What unfair business practices he has. If only that evil overlord would be nice to his competitors like the other multi-million/billion dollar companies out there.
(edited 06-13-2000).]

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Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Baltimore MD, USA
Posts: 717

quote:

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Originally posted by na2rboy:
As far as your hard drive crash, do you know for a fact that MS's recover CD would not have worked?

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What recover CD? I might be one of the poor unfortunate computer purchasers who got home and discovered that I had a hard drive based recovery image system as my back up.

"Well, first you have to re-format your bad drive, then insert your Windows installation CD and... Oh, you don't have one? Tsk, tsk."

Registered: Mar 2000
Location: Richmond, VA, USA
Posts: 151

Nowak, I have read plenty about the MS trial, thanks. I disagree that MS broke the products of any other company. My last post was sarcastic. MS is not satan incarnate. I recently read an article that sarcastically mentioned AOL/Time Warner (parent of Netscape) being asked to join NATO. Get it?

Winchell, you may not be one of those that receives a recover CD. Or you may be. I am fairly certain that if you purchase a computer from a reputable company and your hard drive goes bad, they are not going to leave you hanging with no operating system.

Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Metro Station, Hollywood and Highland
Posts: 1018

I won't claim to know how future Windows recovery CDs will work, but I do know that the recovery CD that came with my Tosiba laptop did not restore my OS when my hard disk crashed. I eventually had to restore Windows 98 by borrowing a friend's copy of the full Win 98 CD, but only after wasting a full weekend working with the recovery CD. Based on this experience, I have absolutely no confidence that any "medialess" versions of Windows are easily restorable.

Now it's possible that I didn't know what I was doing. I consider my computer saavy slightly above that of the average consumer, and I know that if I have data recovery problems, they can only be worse for the average Joe. For all the problems I've had installing Linux (and helping others install it) the one thing I've had to fall back on is having the physical CD of the complete OS, not just a "recovery" CD, to perform a reinstall in a worst-case scenario.

But Judge Jackson is right about Linux. If anything, Linux competes with Windows 2000 and other distributions of Unix, not Windows 98 or MacOS 9. MS isn't a monopoly in the enterprise market, it's the consumer market where the company exercises exclusive control. Try walking into Best Buy or CompUSA and find an Intel or AMD box with anything other than Windows on it.

I admire Bill Gates' business acumen and his sheer versimilitude in building such a vast success, but he crosses the line when consumers like me get caught in the crossfire. Back in 1997, I had Netscape installed on my machine, but I wanted to give the new IE4 a try. So I downloaded it, didn't like it, and uninstalled it. For a week afterward, my Windows 95 crashed continually, and by the end of the week it simply stopped working altogether. I tried to get help on a newsgroup, only to find that hundreds of people had a similar experience with IE4. The browser is threaded so tightly into the registry, that it essentially "rips" the registry when IE4 is uninstalled unless you know how to manually edit it first (this didn't happen with IE3). The point is that MS was so determined to prove to all parties involved that the browser is part of the OS, that it ceased to matter how the consumer was affected.

So maybe it's an exaggeration to say that MS is the root of all evil. That doesn't mean we shouldn't look each new MS "innovation" with suspicion, especially one that deprives us of a physical copy of the software when things go wrong.

Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Baltimore MD, USA
Posts: 717

quote:

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Originally posted by na2rboy:
Winchell, you may not be one of those that receives a recover CD. Or you may be. I am fairly certain that if you purchase a computer from a reputable company and your hard drive goes bad, they are not going to leave you hanging with no operating system.

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Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Baltimore MD, USA
Posts: 717

quote:

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Originally posted by na2rboy:
Gates wanted to disadvantage a competitor? Holy crap. What unfair business practices he has. If only that evil overlord would be nice to his competitors like the other multi-million/billion dollar companies out there.

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Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but the "But gee, Mom! Everybody else is doing it!" defense is even more worthless in matters of Federal law than it is in matters with your mother.

Granted, corporations want to disadvantage rival corporations but US law draws some strict limits on the methods they can use. Microsoft violated those limits rather flagrantly.

Microsoft violated the law of the land. If you disagree with the law, I suggest you take it up with your congressman.

Registered: Feb 2000
Location:
Posts: 1571

Anyone who believe that Microsoft is innocent should take their head our of the sand. If there was a charge for making and selling defective software to people they would have been guilty too.

Even when they got caught with their pants down, they showed no remorse for what they did. I often get the impression that they feel that they are above the law.

This being said, I still don't think that MS should be broken up. I really don't see the point of this. What the DOJ should have done is force them to make the OS open source, and force them to make software for other operating systems.

What do you all think?

Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Metro Station, Hollywood and Highland
Posts: 1018

Forcing Microsoft to open source Windows would create more problems that it would solve. For one thing, there's no consensus on what "open source" means. Does it simply mean that people have the right to read the code? Can they modify it? Can they redistribute it? Should the code be placed under a copyleft license like the GPL or a non-copyleft license like the BSD? I don't think there's anywhere near enough agreement on intellectual property rights (Napster, anyone?) to start tinkering with open-sourcing a proprietary product against a company's will, even if it is in consumers' best interest.

Registered: Oct 1999
Location: College Station, TX
Posts: 143

How about this: I don't really know whether or not they broke the law - but I think the DoJ going after them and a Federal judge concurring suggests that maybe they did. I'll wait for the appeal decision and the postmortem to make my final call on the legality of MSFT business practices.

The question that I think most of us civilians want to answer is: is it good justice?

To me, it depends on whether they really coded things with the primary purpose of screwing up their competition's products. I don't consider an OS upgrade that makes it impossible to delete the IE icon to be an example of evilness, even though it would be annoying. However, changing things just to make Netscape NOT work is over the line.

The devil, as usual, is in the details. A lot of what happens with MSFT stuff can be explained either by evil intent or unmanegable or sloppy code. Based on my personal experience with MSFT products, I vote for it being somewhere in the middle (caveat emptor- I've been using Macs since the 512E and I only gave up and switched to MS-Word a year ago). When I'm paranoid, I think they make their Mac applications buggy so that Mac users will decide to switch to Windows. On other days I think that stupidity is a sufficient explanation.

As in Watergate, the coverup is more damning than the crime...the memo trail and getting caught with the faked software demo, along with the clueless "We did nothing wrong" attitude make me want them to be guilty.

Finally, don't be so sure about Linux being only for gearheads. On ZDTV a few months ago, they were showing that Intel decided on Linux for their Internet appliance. Remember that Windows used to be just a front end for DOS.

Registered: Mar 2000
Location: Richmond, VA, USA
Posts: 151

Man, it is really going to be tough defending MS against 5 people!

Winchell, you are really planning out what is going to happen when your hard drive crashes. Good for you. I hope your macintosh hard drive never crashes.

My "everybody else is doing it" is not a defense, but a call for people who are dogging MS to open their eyes to common business practice. If you are going to hate MS for it, hate all companies for it, including the beloved Netscape/AOL/Time-Warner conglomerate. Use the same standards you are using to judge MS as for the companies you like. You may not like them anymore.

I don't believe MS violated the law of the land, and the appeals process may or may not prove me right. Oh yeah, and I am pretty sure my head is not buried in the sand.

Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Baltimore MD, USA
Posts: 717

quote:

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Originally posted by na2rboy:
Winchell, you are really planning out what is going to happen when your hard drive crashes. Good for you. I hope your macintosh hard drive never crashes.

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Well, maybe it was a worst case scenario, but this one isn't going to be particularly unlikely nor rare.
And if my Macintosh drive crashes, so what? I just reformat it and re-install the OS from the CD-ROM, like you used to be able to do with Windows.

quote:

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Originally posted by na2rboy:
My "everybody else is doing it" is not a defense, but a call for people who are dogging MS to open their eyes to common business practice. If you are going to hate MS for it, hate all companies for it, including the beloved Netscape/AOL/Time-Warner conglomerate. Use the same standards you are using to judge MS as for the companies you like. You may not like them anymore.

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At least here we are in agreement. I don't care very much for what these other megacorporations are doing either. It's just that Microsoft is so flagrantly blatant and arrogantly unrepentant about it.
Hopefully the other corporations will also be brought to justice.

Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Metro Station, Hollywood and Highland
Posts: 1018

quote:

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Originally posted by na2rboy:
My "everybody else is doing it" is not a defense, but a call for people who are dogging MS to open their eyes to common business practice. If you are going to hate MS for it, hate all companies for it, including the beloved Netscape/AOL/Time-Warner conglomerate. Use the same standards you are using to judge MS as for the companies you like. You may not like them anymore.

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Registered: Mar 2000
Location: Richmond, VA, USA
Posts: 151

The word "hate" should not offend you. It means to dislike something intensely, which is how many people feel towards MS/Bill Gates. No big deal.