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To: miraje who wrote (14648)	12/5/1997 3:55:00 AM
From: Charles Hughes	Respond to of 24154

>>I'll take your word for it that there is a border between OS and application. However, I would postulate that a big reason that the software business is a shining star of the US economy is precisely because the government is too slow and stupid to have figured out how to regulate and interfere with it up to this point.<< What a lot of investors don't understand about computer business history is that the government created it out of whole cloth. We have discussed this at length here before, so I won't reiterate - if you're interested you can hunt down that debate. Just a few details: The government funded all the primary technology from the punch card to the microcirsuit to the compiled language. They created the internet. Government scientists employed by the Navy and other departments actually invented a great deal of the early stuff. Researchers at companies funded often as not by government grants did a lot of the rest. IBM was dragged into the business, as they admit. Etcetera. Could we please give the Milton Friedman dogma a rest then? Chaz

To: miraje who wrote (14648)	12/5/1997 1:49:00 PM
From: cheryl williamson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

JB, Who's talking about gov't regulation of the computer business? Enforcing the anti-trust laws certainly is not an example of gov't meddling in the affairs of private enterprise, and what happened in the automotive business and the move to put jobs in Mexico had nothing to do with anti-trust enforcement. Contract tying is illegal. No one is allowed to do it, not MSFT not GM, not GE, not anyone. If the court decides that MSFT is guilty of contract tying, then they have to pay the penalty, just like anyone else. Plain and simple. That's not gov't regulation, that's called law enforcement. If Congress decides the anti-trust laws are too weak, mainly because of MSFT's behavior, they may vote to strengthen them JUST TO REIGN IN MSFT. If that happens, so be it. If public fear of MFST monopolizing e-commerce forces new legislation to be passed that regulates e-commerce, then MSFT has only itself to blame. They will have brought the whole thing down on themselves and the rest of us in the computer industry. cheers, cherylw

To: miraje who wrote (14648)	12/7/1997 5:06:00 PM
From: Columbo	Respond to of 24154

I'll take your word for it that there is a border between OS and application To write high quality software that does not crash, you want to write "layers" of code with well define interfaces. You want to create a buffer between "objects" or layers of code. Thus, one layer can not cause problems in other layers. Small in better and easier to manage. It is all about managing and manipulating data. When layers are "integrated", 10 bugs arise for every bug you fixed. Cloning also happens (bloat code) to change different versions of the same code. Call Forwarding for you telephone switch has 24 different versions. Guess how many times that 50K lines of code is cloned? NT is 20 million lines of code? Yea, right. Tell MS to learn OO programming at their next shareholder meeting. MH #0