I wrote 'Nuke Redmond'

From: allisonp_at_world.std.com <(allisonp_at_world.std.com)>
Date: Mon May 8 08:04:13 2000

> And I've run Win95 for a year with no problems. It wasn't until Microsoft
> Office was installed on the machine did it lock up and I wasted two days
> trying to reinstall Win95, from scratch, before giving up and going to Linux
> so I could continue my job.

Humm, suggests somthing was wrong or you were trying to use the OEM
install.

> Hardware didn't change. Just the addition of Microsoft Office.

That pig...

> Now, how much damage did the ILOVEYOU virus do? How much will it cost to
> fix the damage that ILOVEYOU virus did?

nothing. We were properly prepared and the key users are educated. We
did recive copies but they were deleted before they could be activated.
We assume there are worms/virus/trogans out ther and they can hurt us
so we are prepared.

> Windows that precludes such from being done in other systems, other than a
> lack of economic insentive and the fear of bring the wrath of Microsoft down

Gee I thought that it was already being done with star office.

> > for Windows is to be mandated by the courts to be made available to anyone
> > who wishes to write applications for Windows, MS is correct in demanding
> > that the code be released only to companies who, including all their
> > employees as individuals, be barred for a period of, say, ten years, from
> > participating in the production of any operating system which might be
> > used as a competitor to Microsoft's OS products, including the drivers,
> > utilities, or ancillary programs, e.g. a browser.
>
> Why? Such draconian measures would be such that you might not get very
> many companies (or programmers) willing to even consider such a deal.

Yes it would eb unreasonable. Most NDA and Non competative agreements
I've seen never exceeded 2 years, FYI.

> Personally, I feel that the two worst things to happen to our industry
> have been Unix and Microsoft. I won't go into why I think Unix is bad, but
> Microsoft has definitely kept the industry back technically, if only with
> entrenching the poor design of the IBM PC as a standard for nearly 20 years.
> Hell, if this sets the industry back 20 years that'll be the best thing to
> happen! Imagine, decent hardware! Software that actually works! Less
> slavish reliance on computers! That's bad?

Well I agree. the PC is generally poor hardware. Good hardware has always
existed, and it was never cheap.

> Another bad aspect of Microsoft is the proliferation of file formats.
> Microsoft Word 6 format is imcompatible with Microsoft Word 95 format is
> imcompatible with Microsoft Word 98 format is imcompatible with Microsoft
> Word 2000 format. Sure Microsoft MAY make a utility available for upgrading
> the document but they don't make it easy and heaven forbid you find a cache
> of documents seven years old in the backups that is in Word 6 format.

Yes, this is a major problem and while they claim to have support for
conversions they don't work well or in the case of WP->Word plain don't
work.

My solution was and still is Runoff, it provides what I need for test
files and it runs on everything I have (NS* DOS, CP/M-80, DOS, WIN, VMS,
RT11, RSTS, unix, linix).

Allison
Received on Mon May 08 2000 - 08:04:13 BST