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To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (17837)	3/5/1998 9:15:00 AM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

Palm Computing Accuses Microsoft of Trademark Violations in Europe nytimes.com Seems that maybe the EU is perceived as a better venue for legal battles against a certain company. Microsoft has been widely criticized for its decision to adopt Palm as a name. Microsoft originally developed its Windows CE operating system for larger clam-shaped portable devices that came with a small keyboard. Analysts said sales of those products had generally been disappointing. Earlier this year at a reporters roundtable in San Jose, Calif., Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates angrily disputed suggestions that his company was intentionally confusing the market and stealing ideas from an innovator. He said the idea was "beyond bizarre," that his company had "zero market share" in hand-held computing and that it had chosen the Palm PC name after doing original market research in which he was not involved. Right. Bill's sounding a little random here, don't you think? It's all right to send in the lawyers after random web sites with windows or nt in their name, but other people's trademarks and copyrights are worth dirt. Anyway, he wasn't involved. Cheers, Dan. P.S. I missed the thrilling conclusion of the Reuters harlem story, www5.zdnet.com Microsoft donated $8 million in software and cash to schools in 1997, according to company spokeswoman Mary Stevenson.

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (17837)	3/5/1998 9:39:00 AM
From: Thure Meyer	Respond to of 24154

Operating Systems, Its difficult for me to equate DOS or Windows with an operating system when all we had was a buggy file manager and command parser. Usually when I think of an OS the terms pre-emptive multi-tasking, context switching, virtual memory, and the like come to mind. This is something that Microsoft tried to address with NT not with DOS, Windows, Windows 95 and so on. I can understand the thrust of the kids question? Why has it taken MS so long to come up with an acceptable PC operating system? One that doesn't crash 4 times a day, one that has a complete and standard implementation of TCP/IP, that will interoperate with other networked devices without all kinds of contortions. The state of the art in the 1980's for operating systems was very advanced. Any number of sound real-time kernels were available (e..g, VRTX) and cheap. Most of what you see in UNIX, Plan9, NT, Chorus or whatever was well known in CS work for decades. And from a historical perspective what MS delivered was and continues to be mediocre. In many ways Microsoft has pulled the wool over peoples eyes with respect to this since most people approach computers like a black box and haven't seen other elegant solutions like NEXT, the original LISA, good desktop publishing software and other systems designed to exploit the man/machine interface. If nothing else lets get out from under this mind numbing mediocrity that Microsoft is promoting as well as the world of recycled cut&paste Word, PowerPoint, Excel documents that pass for productivity tools. Thure Thure

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (17837)	3/5/1998 11:09:00 AM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

Bill's diary, March 4 slate.com This is pretty entertaining, but you have to read it for yourself. I only got to quote the 8/16/32 bit part, according to Bill Reuters messed the question up, as I suspected. There was one kid, Luis, who asked how hard it was to port 16-bit apps to 32-bit apps. I thought that was a great question from an 11-year-old. I also explained to the students how Senate hearings work and what it was like in D.C. Which makes Bill's answer, " software had to wait for the power of microprocessors to catch up" a headscratcher for sure. Except for Microsoft, nobody ever had much problem shipping 32bit operating systems and applications, for whatever was available. Or maybe Reuters screwed up the answer as well as the question. Cheers, Dan.