Whatever, Reggie. As a "neutral" observer, you're just the guy to tell us all where the judge is in error, right?
Just for entertainment, here's a bit from an a article from an ertswhile friend of Bill on the ease of use matter, Walter Mossberg from the WSJ, Sept. 30. Warped as I am, I'd say this might say something about the dreaded "damage to consumers" issue, but never mind.
Dear Diary: I'm Tired Of the Way Windows Crashes and Freezes!
THE OTHER DAY, I was sitting in my office when it happened: the dreaded Microsoft Windows Blue
Screen of Death. I wasn't doing anything special, just trying to print a document from Microsoft Word
97 running on a new, powerful Hewlett-Packard Pavilion PC. But suddenly, the screen turned entirely
blue, and this message appeared: WINDOWS . A fatal exception 0D has occurred at
0028:C000B25A in VXD VMM (01) + 0000A25A. The current application will be terminated. I had to
reboot the PC, start up Word again and then call up the document before I could print.
Irritating as this incident was, it wasn't unusual. In fact, it was just one of 23 incidents I recorded
over a seven-day period in which six different Windows PCs I was using either crashed, froze or
exhibited other unexpected or puzzling behavior. The problems ranged from unreadable file formats in
e-mail to complete failures of the PC. Eleven of the 23 incidents were so bad they required me to
stop working and reboot the PC, a process that took up to four minutes, even on a very fast, very
new Dell computer.
In almost every case, I was running multiple programs when the problems occurred. But this wasn't
an unfair test: Microsoft touts Windows as being able to handle such multitasking. And all of the
programs I was using are well-known. They included Lotus Organizer, America Online, Netscape
Navigator, MusicMatch Jukebox (a digital music player) and Microsoft's own Word, Internet Explorer
and Outlook Express e-mail program. |
