Chambers wrote:
> IIRC, IBM wanted an OS and a BASIC interpreter.  They went to MS for 
> MS-BASIC, and said, "By the way, do you have an OS?"  MS purchased QDOS 
> from some other guy, then licensed it to IBM.
> 
> The other guy started b*tching because he only got the one flat fee 
> instead of all those licensing fees, but hey, he's the one who signed 
> the deal.

The way I heard it was that Gates got some code off a mate and then 
decided to sell it for money, pretending it was his own. And the other 
guy was naturally a little upset that somebody was selling his product 
without his permission.

The facts of the story you present are significantly different.

>> Sure, nobody forces web developers to use IE-specific extensions. Yet 
>> 90% of all websites work properly only if you use IE.
> 
> Have you surfed the Web recently?  I haven't used IE in years.  I've 
> been using Firefox and, more recently, Chrome, and I can't remember the 
> last time I had a page display incorrectly.
> 
> Granted, there are pages that check the useragent string, and then give 
> you a *message* saying they might not work properly... but then they 
> proceed to work properly.

At work, I use two web-based applications which actually don't work 
without IE. (And work correctly only with certain versions of it, for 
that matter.) In general, most sites out there do now work with Firefox, 
although it definitely depends on which kind of sites you visit. I'm not 
sure if more sites work with Firefox because the web is becomming more 
standards-compliant, or because Firefox is getting better at emulating 
the brokeness of IE...

>>> Nobody's forcing you to use it.
>>
>> I'm sure this one has been argued to death. While *technically* this 
>> is true, the reality is that M$ has carefully engineered a situation 
>> where little viable alternative actually exists. (Let's face it, if 
>> somebody else was producing decent software, M$ would go under fairly 
>> quickly.)
> 
> So, first you complain that MS sucks, then you admit that everyone else 
> sucks worse.

No, I said M$ has carefully arranged it so that you don't have much 
choice. They deliberately stop people from making better products. Or if 
better products get made, they make it as hard as possible for regular 
users to be able to use them.

I wouldn't mind if M$ was top dog because they actually made the best 
products, but that's simply not true. They're top dog because they use 
trickery to keep the competition out.

> Maybe you just don't want to admit that making software is hard, and MS 
> is doing they best they can given current market conditions and user 
> requirements?

Yes, making software is hard. Making software is *so* hard, in fact, 
that a bunch of people who don't even have access to the spec for the M$ 
Word file format managed to write a word processor that reads M$ Word 
files more reliably than M$ Word itself, and can repair files that M$ 
Word cannot. Clearly M$, the richest software producer on the face of 
God's Earth, is doing the very best they can.

(The best they can to screw you out of money for an inferior product, 
that is...)

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>> Whatever happened to HURD?
> 
>   Linux ate it.

Heh. The GNU guys must have loved that...

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Invisible wrote:
> Microsoft's entire history seems to revolve around stealing other 
> people's stuff and watching them go bankrupt faster than they can sue.

Cite?

>> Name two competitors. Were you even in the market at the time it was 
>> hashing out?
> 
> When the hell was the IBM PC invented anyway?

I rest my case.

> Actually... I'm not aware of anything else that does what Exchange does. 
> Which is a little bit odd, really.

There ya go.

> I know of a few office suites that manage to not constantly crash like 
> MS Office does. 

 > Apache is notable for doing the same thing as IIS

Only in the broad sense that UNIX does the same thing as Windows. They 
really aren't comparable.

> There are lots of database engines out 
> there; I doubt many of them are worse than SQL Server.

You haven't tried MySql then.

It sounds more like "I don't know the capabilities of Microsoft systems, so 
I listen to what Linux enthusiasts tell me about it." :-)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

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Invisible wrote:
> Both also had a nasty habit of the metadata not matching the source 
> code. Like, open a file, add a new method, and VS seems not to "know 
> about it" until you close and reopen VS. (You'd hope that just saving 
> the file would be enough. No. Maybe just compiling it then? No.)

And how long ago was this, and how out of date were the university's 
computers? I was pretty impressed when VS2005 would add intellisense for 
routines I'd typed into other files and *didn't* save yet.

> I imagine on today's computers it's probably not quite so slow, but I 
> doubt it's become any less inflexible.

So, "I don't know what I'm talking about, but I'll guess it's bad." Cool.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

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scott wrote:
> I've never made any multi-file projects, but I would be very surprised 
> if you couldn't set what is run.

I'll grant you that one is buried a little deep in the menu structure. It 
always takes me maybe 2 or 3 minutes to remember where it is. Assuming you 
didn't actually, you know, type the question into the help system.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

Post a reply to this message

scott wrote:
> start configuring the build tools, using the debugger, and of course the 
> form designer. 

And the source code repository, the debugger, the regression test tools, the 
planning, the bug tracking, ...

Your university probably didn't pay for the big version that has all that 
stuff, too.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

Post a reply to this message

Invisible wrote:
> You know what? The Internet abounds with people complaining about Word 
> not working right, yet nobody ever seems to complain about Excel or 
> Access or PowerPoint or Outlook... Wanna take a guess why that is?

Perhaps because most everyone uses Word, while only people motivated enough 
to look up things in the help pages use stuff like powerpoint or access?

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

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Neeum Zawan wrote:
>     Fractint on DOS. Can't think of a single criticism. Awesome program.

Cool. I think I ran this once.

>     Midnight Commander on Linux. 

I have yet to try this out. I open a shell window and maximize it when I use 
Linux. Indeed, I giggle uncontrollably every time someone at work tries to 
help me and opens up a Gnome file browser to look for something.

I grant that VIM doesn't suck. :-)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

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Invisible wrote:
> I'm pretty sure that one was Kerberos. And the point was they made it so 
> their Kerberos implementation wouldn't work with anybody else's.

But the standard allowed for that, is my point. Why have a "reserved for use 
by vendors" field if you're going to break when vendors use it.

> leaves the issue of these fields being reversed for future use, and when 

It wasn't "reserved for future use" as I understand it. It was "reserved for 
relaying hidden information we failed to account for in the standard that 
your OS needs".

>> What other standards have they done this with.
> 
> *cough* The web?

Sorry? In what sense? That the web browser doesn't follow standards set 
after the browser was written doesn't really mean they intentionally broke 
the web.

>> What I haven't figured out is the huge number of people screaming at 
>> Microsoft for bundling programs with Windows that competes with 
>> programs they give away for free. Say what?
> 
> Before Internet Explorer, web browsers used to cost money. 

No they didn't. Netscape at one point *tried* to charge for their browser 
for *corporate* use, but since they'd cloned it from a free browser to start 
with, nobody ever paid for it.

> So yeah, the products they give away for free compete with other 
> products which are free *now*... because you can't sell them for money 
> any more.

People are *still* complaining about it, tho. Google is suing Microsoft for 
bundling IE right now. The EU is suing MS for bundling Media Player, in 
spite of every other operating system coming with the manufacturers media 
player and in spite of there being half a dozen highly capable free media 
players available.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

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>> start configuring the build tools, using the debugger, and of course 
>> the form designer. 
> 
> And the source code repository, the debugger, the regression test tools, 
> the planning, the bug tracking, ...
> 
> Your university probably didn't pay for the big version that has all 
> that stuff, too.

Well, it had the debugger, and that worked. The rest of what you talked 
about would probably be pointless in a 2-week programming project anyway.

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