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To: Andy Thomas who wrote (19955)	6/8/1998 6:58:00 AM
From: Reginald Middleton	Respond to of 24154

<Yeah, you guys are so phreakin' smart i'm amazed.> Aren't they??

To: Andy Thomas who wrote (19955)	6/8/1998 7:54:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Respond to of 24154

Well, Andy, I'm all for sarcasm and everything, but, like, what's the point? Backing up this particular tortured chain of messages, I get to 19914, where you write: >>W. Brian Arthur, an economist at the Santa Fe Institute...>> This idiot is an ivory-tower economist... what does he know about commercial software? The Chicago School guys, thought to be in Bill's camp till Bork signed up on the wrong side, are all a bunch of ivory tower economists too. Having attended the Chicago School myself, I'd say it's the mother of all ivory tower institutions, and most people there would consider "ivory tower academic" a complement. Another one of those objectivity / bias things, I'd say, where people who stand up for Microsoft rate and those who don't, don't. Just another variant on the old ad hominem attack, merely the first step in mastering cheesy high school debate techniques. He says MSFT hasn't innovated... i still maintain FAT was innovative at the time of DOS. And everybody else can't quite fathom the point of this. Aside from the dubious proposition that FAT was innovative, it's not something that Microsoft (which was mostly Bill and a few close friends at the time) came up with to begin with. MSFT puts new stuff out just as fast as all their little fingers will type... it's just that it's so difficult to get that ever-growing list of bloated features to work together... maybe COM will be the answer... (stifling a guffaw)... There you're taking a sarcastic attitude toward mighty Microsoft- but by the end of this chain you're picking up a "right on" from the Mind of Reg(TM). Where do you go from here? Beats me, I'm just posting this because it's a slow news day. Cheers, Dan.

To: Andy Thomas who wrote (19955)	6/8/1998 9:53:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

The word according to Microsoft zdnet.com That word being "innovation", not the first word to come to mean something else in Microsoftese, I've been beating that dead horse for a long time.. This guy goes into a little more length than my current sarcastic tagline, "Microsoft must be free to imitate, I mean integrate, er, innovate- yeah, that's the ticket", but the point is much the same. Microsoft has a history of claiming as "new" technologies that weren't originally created by it. Remember your history: Microsoft didn't build the DOS upon which its empire was built. The company first licensed DOS' ancestor and then snatched it away for a criminally low price from Seattle Computer Products in 1980. The first incarnation of Windows was merely a graphical shell over DOS, and that paradigm was directly influenced by Apple's Macintosh, ideas from which Microsoft borrowed freely. Windows NT? It was designed by David Cutler, who also was the creator of OpenVMS for Digital Equipment. And with every upgrade, NT looks more and more like a mainframe operating system. It doesn't end there, if you consider the number of products Microsoft develops that were originally designed by others: the browser, the spreadsheet, even my beloved Microsoft Golf. In the credits of that product, Microsoft actually cites as "inspiration" another program, Links 386 Pro. Innovation, according to Microsoft, must then mean borrowing concepts from the best technology available, recreating them in its own image and dumping them into Windows. And if it can't be borrowed, buy it. Or steal it, or make somebody an offer they can't refuse. Stac and Cutler's DEC code go with the first, Spyglass and Lernout & Hauspie tend toward the second. Maybe Bill should switch the line to "the world must be safe for Standard Microsoft business practice", or something. Cheers, Dan.

To: Andy Thomas who wrote (19955)	6/9/1998 3:46:00 AM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

Have Bugs, Will Deliver (Help! Help!) nytimes.com Stephen Manes tries out some new software, and some fingers get pointed. Not the middle ones this time, except in passing. He blamed some of the problems on Microsoft's shortcomings: "We're intersecting with at least three component technologies that are not well implemented and not well documented." The technologies he referred to are three pieces of leaky software plumbing known as OLE, DirectX and OpenGL, which Microsoft includes in Windows 95 and applications. Developing software that relies on all three is slightly less daring than hiring Moe, Larry and Curly. I asked Jeff Prosise, an author and lecturer on Windows programming, for a reality check. "If you ask who's at fault, there's plenty of blame to go around," he said. "Developers are often guilty of not testing their product adequately, but if they're working with a technology that's complex and not well documented, there's only so much they can do." Microsoft's OLE technology, he said, "is poorly documented and does not work." "Every programmer curses it," he continued. "It's implemented differently in every application, and you can't say one way is correct, because the documentation is so miserable. OLE is an ugly and ill-conceived protocol that deserves to die a slow and agonizing death." But if you want your program to appear as a more or less seamless part of Microsoft Office 97 applications, as Liveart98 can when it works, OLE is hard to avoid. DirectX has been a shaky technology since its outset. Designed to make Windows multimedia applications run faster, it often causes video problems that can be hard to diagnose and repair, even after you download and install the latest video driver software to help insure that the driver is not the culprit. Nothing said about OpenGL, though. I don't know if this is part of the integrity and uniformity of the Windows experience, or just a sneak preview of your digital 19th nervous breakdown, after Bill's DNS "initiative" emerges from the vapors. Cheers, Dan.