Microsoft Hatred FAQ

[Xah Lee]

Microsoft Hatred, FAQ

Xah Lee, 20020518

Question: U.S. Judges are not morons, and quite a few others are
not morons. They find MS guilty, so it must be true.

Answer: so did the German population thought Jews are morons by
heritage, to the point that Jews should be exterminated from earth.
Apparently, the entire German population cannot be morons, they must be
right.

Judge for yourself, is a principle i abide by. And when you judge, it
is better to put some effort into it.

How much you invest in this endearvor depends on how important the
issue is to you. If you are like most people, for which the issue of
Microsoft have remote effect on your personal well-being, then you can
go out and buy a case of beer on one hand and pizza on the other, and
rap with your online confabulation buddies about how evil is MS. If you
are an author writing a book on this, then obviously its different
because your reputation and ultimately daily bread depend on what you
put down. If you are a MS competitor such as Apple or Sun, then
obviously you will see to it with as much money as you can cough out
that MS is guilty by all measures and gets put out of business. If you
are a government employee such as a judge, of course it is your
interest to please your boss, with your best accessment of the air.

When i judge things, i like to imagine things being serious, as if my
wife is a wager, my daughter is at stake, that any small factual error
or mis-judgement or misleading perspective will cause unimaginable
things to happen. Then, my opinions becomes better ones.

Q: Microsoft's Operating System is used over 90% of PCs. If that's
not monopoly, i don't know what is.

A: Now suppose there is a very ethical company E, whose products have
the best performance/price ratio, and making all the competitors
looking so majorly stupid and ultimately won over 90% of the market as
decided by consumers. Is E now a monopoly? Apparently, beer drinkers
and pizza eaters needs to study a bit on the word monopoly, from the
perspectives of language to history to law. If they have some extra
time, they can sharpen views from philosophy & logic contexts as well.

Q: What about all the people in the corporate environments who are
forced to use MS products and aren't allowed the option/choice to use
Mac/Linux/UNIX?

A: Kick your boss's ass, or, choose to work for a company who have
decisions that you liked.

Q: What about MS buying out all competitors?

A: Microsoft offered me $1 grand for saying good things about them.
They didn't put a gunpoint on my head. I CHOOSE to take the bribe.
Likewise, sold companies can and have decided what's best for them.
It's nothing like under gunpoint.

Q: Microsoft forced computer makers to not install competitor's
applications or OSes.

A: It is free country. Don't like MS this or that? Fuck MS and talk to
the Solaris or BeOS or AIX or HP-UX or Apple or OS/2 or Amiga or NeXT
or the Linuxes with their free yet fantastically easy-to-use and
network-spamming X-Windows. Bad business prospects? Then grab the
opportunity and become an entrepreneur and market your own beats-all
OS. Too difficult? Let's sue Microsoft!

Q: Microsoft distributed their Internet Explorer web browser free,
using their “monopoly� power to put Netscape out of business.

A: entirely inane coding monkeys listen: It takes huge investment to
give away a quality software free. Netscape can give away Operating
Systems free to put MS out of business too. Nobody is stopping Sun
Microsystem from giving Java free, or BeOS a browser free, or Apple to
bundle QuickTime deeply with their OS free.

Not to mention that Netscape is worse than IE in just about every
version till they become the OpenSource mozilla shit and eventually
bought out by AOL and still shit.

• Netscape struggles, announced open browser source code in 1998-01,
industry shock
http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease558.html

• Netscape browser code released in 1998-03. Mozilla FAQ.
http://mozilla.org/docs/mozilla-faq.html

• AOL buys Netscape in 1998-11 for 4.2 billion.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-218360.html?legacy=cnet

• Jamie Zawinski, resignation and postmortem, 1999-04
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html

• suck.com, Greg Knauss & Terry Colon, 2000-04, Netscape 6 mockery
http://www.suck.com/daily/2000/04/10/
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/_...s_netscape.zip

• Xah Lee, Netscape Crap
http://xahlee.org/Writ_dir/macos-talk/58.txt

Q: Microsoft implemented extra things to standard protocols in
their OS so that other OS makers cannot be compatible with their OS
while their OS can be compatible with all. They used this Embrace &
Extend to lock out competitors.

A: My perspective is this: suppose you are now a company who's OS sits
over 90% of computers (regardless how this come to be for the moment).
Now, lots of “standard� protocols in the industry is a result of
popularity (RFC = Really Fucking Common), and popularity resulted from
being free, from the RFCs of the fantastically incompetent by the
truely stupid unix tech morons. What can you do if you want to improve
these protocols? If you go with totally different protocols, then the
incompatibility with the rest 10% isn't your best interest. I would
adopt existing protocols, and extend them with improvements. Being a
commercial entity, i'm sorry that it is not my duty to release my
improvments to my competitors. Any of you incompetent IBM/AIX/OS/2 or
SGI/Irix or HP/HP-UX or Sun/Solaris or Apple/AU-X/Mac can do the same,
not that they haven't.

Of course, the universe of moronic unixers and Apple fanatics cannot
see that. The unix idiots cannot see that their fantastically stupid
protocols are fantastically stupid in the first place. The Apple
fanatics are simply chronically fanatic.

Q: Microsoft product is notorious for their lack of security.

A: In my very sound opinion, if Microsoft's OS's security flaws is
measured at one, then the unixes are measured at one myriad. If unixes
suddenly switch popularity with Windows, then the world's computers
will collapse uncontrollably by all sorts of viruses and attacks. This
can be seen for technical person who knows unix history well:

• http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/freebooks.html (e.g.
ftpd/proftpd, inetd/xinetd, sendmail/qmail, X-Windows, telnet, passwd,
login, rsh, rlogin.)

• on the criminality of buffer overflow, by Henry Baker, 2001.
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/_..._overflow.html

• Fast Food The UNIX Way:
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/_.../fastfood.html

• Jargon File: http://www.tuxedo.org/%7Eesr/jargon/

• The Rise of Worse is Better, by Richard P. Gabriel, 1991, at
http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

and plenty other pre-90s documents to get a sense of just how
fantastically insecure unix was and is. Unix today is not just
technically slacking in the “security� department, but the unix
ways created far more unmanageable security risks that's another topic
to discuss.

The unix crime, is not just being utmost technically sloppy. Its entire
system and “philosophy†� created an entire generation of incompetent
programers and thinking and programing languages, with damage that is a
few magnitude times beyond all computer viruses and attacks damages in
history combined. See also:

• Responsible Software License:
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/w...e_license.html

Q: Microsoft products are simply poor quality.

A: Perhaps this in general is true pre-1997. I think the vast majority
of MS products today have better performance/price ratio then
competitors. This includes their operating system, their input devices
(mouse & keyboard), their X-Box gaming console, their software game
titles, their software architectures and languages (.NET, C#), their
technologies (few i know: SMB), and many of their software applications
(suite of Office, which consistently ranked top since early 90s).

e.g. Tom's hardware review on x-box, esp in comparison with Sony
Playstation 2. (2002-02):
http://www4.tomshardware.com/consume...204/index.html

the leading role of MS Office products can be seen in MacUser &
MacWorld magazine reviews through out early 90s.

Q: BeOS was once to be bundled with PC, but MS meddled with it and
basically at the end fucked Be up.

A: BeOS is a fantastically fucking useless OS. No DVD player, No Java,
No QuickTime, No games, no Mathematica, no nothing. For all practical
purposes, fucking useless in a different way than every donkey unixes.
Not to mention the evil Apple computer, refused to pass the QuickTime
technology, and tried to prevent BeOS from running on Apple hardware by
refusing to release their PPC hardware spec. Be founder Jean-Louis
Gassee wrote an article about it. Who's fucking whom?

Q: X inc tried to do W, but MS threatened to depart.

A: Dear X inc., try to find a bigger dick for your needs. If you cannot
find any, too bad! Suck it up to the big brother and hold on to what
you can get! If you have the smarts, milk him dry! Free country, free
to choose partnership. Ladies, previous night's indiscretion is not
rape the morning after.

Q: I'm not a beer bucket or pizza hole, but i want to do research
over the web. Is there any free stuff on the web i can grab? I'm an
OpenSource advocate, i demand free things.

A: •
http://www.moraldefense.com/Campaign...AQ/default.htm
(The Center for the Moral Defense of Capitalism)

• http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_repo.../friedman.html (The
Business Community's Suicidal Impulse by Milton Friedman, 1999-03)
local copy

Q: I'm thinking of putting my wife and daughter on the table. What
do you suggest to begin with?

A: Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell:
http://xahlee.org/Periodic_dosage_di...economics.html

Q: Are you confident enough to bet your wifes and daughters for
what you say?

A: No. But I put my reputation in.
-------
This post is archived at:
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/w...hatredfaq.html

Xah
xa*@xahlee.org
∑ http://xahlee.org/

[Mike Meyer]

"David Schwartz" <da****@webmast er.com> writes:

Instead, you outline a class of actions and tag them
all as illegal. That's why we have laws against assault and battery
and unsafe driving. And laws against exercising monopoly power in an
unfair manner.

Interesting how you, again, equate a gun and an argument. It is very
important to you to justify responding to arguments with guns. However, I
reject that premise at its roots, not just in your application of it.

Another straw man. I never mentioned the word "gun" at all, and none
of the crimes I discussed require a gun.

You apparently aren't interested in constructive intercourse on the
question. You're just interesting in knocking down your own
arguments. Personally, I'd rather not watch you masterbate.

<mike
--
Mike Meyer <mw*@mired.or g> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.

[Matt Garrish]

"David Schwartz" <da****@webmast er.com> wrote in message
news:dj******** **@nntp.webmast er.com...

"Matt Garrish" <ma************ *@sympatico.ca> wrote in message
news:GH******** **********@news 20.bellglobal.c om...

I'd be interested in hearing what you think a right is?

A right is a scope of authority. That is, a sphere within which one's
decision is sovereign.

Then why were you claiming that a government can infringe on a person's
rights if those rights are not codified or even accepted by those people?
The idea of inalienable rights for anyone in a Western society only exists
if you believe that the rights of Western societies are inalienable and
should be respected everywhere. There is a huge arrogance in that
assumption, though, and once you enter a jurisdiction that does not hold
your rights to be inalienable they are no longer your rights.

You can have generally agreed upon rights, but as you note, those rights can
only be hoped for if the systems exist to enforce them. Once those systems
erode, you no longer have rights only hopes. The more you allow those
systems to be eroded, the less you can expect your rights to exist.

In the end, the slippery slope theory would suggest that if you allow MS to
get away with bad business practices you are in effect giving all companies
the right to leverage whatever means are at their disposal to do the same,
to the detriment of society.

In Florida, for example, you have the right to gun someone down if you
think they're a bit too menacing. In Canada, most people find that
reprehensible. So does a Floridian visiting Canada have their rights
infringed on by our rogue government because they're not allowed to gun
down menacing looking Canadians at will?

That's obviously a complicated question but totally unrelated to the
issue at hand, which was one's sovereignty over one's own property.
Obviously issues where a person has to use force against another are going
to be complicated. The existence of complicated questions doesn't make the
simple ones complicated.

I brought it up as an example of why rights are difficult in all cases. You
can't claim that anyone has a right to the land they live on. Your only
legitimacy to ownership comes through goverment and its ability to enforce
that legitimacy for you. And if you really want to get contentious, in
Canada and the US your only legitimacy comes from an artificial transaction
between a landowner and your government at some time in the past to
legitimize its sovereignty over Native American land.

Your only real right when it comes to land ownership is to receive some kind
of compensation if it is taken away. Your government could decide at any
time to expropriate your property to build a new highway (for example), and
you'd be out in the cold. You can try to fight the government in court but
more often than not you'll lose because the greater good of society
outweighs your right to own the land (and the assumption is always that
governments work for the greater good of society).

And add to that all the covenants and municipal laws you have to obey when
purchasing property and the notion that you have sovereignty over your land
becomes even less tenable.

Matt

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 23 Oct 2005 11:43:44 -0700, David Schwartz wrote:

You are dishonest, lying sack of shit.

And David posts his true colours to the mast at last. When rational
argument and logical thoughts fails, fall back on personal insults.
--
Steven.

[David Schwartz]

"Mike Meyer" <mw*@mired.or g> wrote in message
news:86******** ****@bhuda.mire d.org...

"David Schwartz" <da****@webmast er.com> writes:

Instead, you outline a class of actions and tag them
all as illegal. That's why we have laws against assault and battery
and unsafe driving. And laws against exercising monopoly power in an
unfair manner.

Interesting how you, again, equate a gun and an argument. It is very
important to you to justify responding to arguments with guns. However, I
reject that premise at its roots, not just in your application of it.

Another straw man. I never mentioned the word "gun" at all, and none
of the crimes I discussed require a gun.
You can't be that stupid, can you?! Tell me it wasn't obvious to you
that the phrase "a gun and an argument" means the difference between force
and disagreement.
You apparently aren't interested in constructive intercourse on the
question. You're just interesting in knocking down your own
arguments. Personally, I'd rather not watch you masterbate.

You're are the one who brought up assault and battery and unsafe
driving, equating Microsoft's persuasive negotiation tactics with force in
an attempt to justify responding to them with force.

DS

[Alan Connor]

"Matt Garrish" wrote:
<body not downloaded>

That does it. From this point on my newsfilter is killing
(leaving on the server) any articles cross-posted to more than
three groups.

To all of the snivelling punks polluting the Usenet with their
verbal diarrhea here:

Shut up and go away.

Done.

(I haven't read a single post here, but don't need to. A bunch
of aliases with no posting histories equals trolls equals verbal
diarrhea.)

And my killfile thanks you for the sumptuous feast all of the
aliases used on this thread have given it.

Do your Mommy's know that you are playing with their computers
again?
AC
--
Homepage: http://home.earthlink.net/~alanconnor/
Fanclub: http://www.pearlgates.net/nanae/kooks/alanconnor.shtml

[David Schwartz]

"Matt Garrish" <ma************ *@sympatico.ca> wrote in message
news:EV******** **********@news 20.bellglobal.c om...

A right is a scope of authority. That is, a sphere within which one's
decision is sovereign.

Then why were you claiming that a government can infringe on a person's
rights if those rights are not codified or even accepted by those people?
The idea of inalienable rights for anyone in a Western society only exists
if you believe that the rights of Western societies are inalienable and
should be respected everywhere. There is a huge arrogance in that
assumption, though, and once you enter a jurisdiction that does not hold
your rights to be inalienable they are no longer your rights.

You can have generally agreed upon rights, but as you note, those rights
can only be hoped for if the systems exist to enforce them. Once those
systems erode, you no longer have rights only hopes. The more you allow
those systems to be eroded, the less you can expect your rights to exist.

This would suggest that rogue governments can't infringe on the rights
of their people because those people have no rights since their societies
don't recognize any. This is another principle I reject at its roots. Your
rights exist whether or not others choose to respect them.

DS

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 23 Oct 2005 13:52:38 -0700, David Schwartz wrote:

The court's determination of the relevent
market, on wich all of their other decisions were predicated, was arbitrary
and bizarre, and the law did not provide any notice of how the market would
be determined.
You keep saying that, as if people could do their word processing and run
their financial accounting software on the micro-controllers of microwave
ovens or the computer in their car engine.

The market of desktop PC is a perfectly obvious and natural market. You
are the one insisting on arbitrarily lumping together who knows what other
products in with the desktop PC. I say "who knows" for a reason -- the
only two examples you have come up with were Apple Macintoshes and
desktop PCs running Linux (both less than 5% of the market *now*, and
even less back when the court was investigating Microsoft). Making your
position even more bizarre, both of these products were recognised by the
court as part of the market in question, both were recognised as potential
competing products put at risk due to Microsoft's illegal behaviour.

In the sense of interchangeabil ity, almost all operating systems are
monopolies.
You don't know what the word monopoly actually means in either law or
economics, do you? What you have written is a perfectly grammatical
sentence that makes no sense whatsoever. If OSes are monopolies, then they
are NOT interchangeable -- but you state in the very next sentence that
they are.
And if you go by application, Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD
are all interchangeable -- there is nothing significant you can do on
one that you can't do on the other.

Try telling that to a business that needs to do computerised book-keeping
of wages and payroll.

--
Steven.

[Roedy Green]

On Sat, 22 Oct 2005 19:54:58 -0300, "Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz"
<sp******@libra ry.lspace.org.i nvalid> wrote or quoted :

As well as blame. The commercializati on of the Internet was grossly
mismanaged. Take the InterNIC - please!

As global bureaucracies go, I think they have done a good job. Can
you imagine herding the cats of egotistical dictators and politicians
from every country on earth who have not a clue about what the
function of domain are?
--
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
http://mindprod.com Again taking new Java programming contracts.

[Matt Garrish]

"David Schwartz" <da****@webmast er.com> wrote in message
news:dj******** **@nntp.webmast er.com...

"Matt Garrish" <ma************ *@sympatico.ca> wrote in message
news:EV******** **********@news 20.bellglobal.c om...

A right is a scope of authority. That is, a sphere within which one's
decision is sovereign.

Then why were you claiming that a government can infringe on a person's
rights if those rights are not codified or even accepted by those people?
The idea of inalienable rights for anyone in a Western society only
exists if you believe that the rights of Western societies are
inalienable and should be respected everywhere. There is a huge arrogance
in that assumption, though, and once you enter a jurisdiction that does
not hold your rights to be inalienable they are no longer your rights.

You can have generally agreed upon rights, but as you note, those rights
can only be hoped for if the systems exist to enforce them. Once those
systems erode, you no longer have rights only hopes. The more you allow
those systems to be eroded, the less you can expect your rights to exist.

This would suggest that rogue governments can't infringe on the rights
of their people because those people have no rights since their societies
don't recognize any. This is another principle I reject at its roots. Your
rights exist whether or not others choose to respect them.

I'd say to that that you're confusing a belief with a right. A belief
doesn't become a right until society acknowledges it as such and puts
measures in place to ensure it. If people are perfectly happy living under
communist rule, who are you to tell them they must have the right to own
property? If that society later acknowledges that it wants the right to own
property then the government (in an ideal society) should respond
accordingly. If the society demands a right and governments denies it, only
then are the people's rights being oppressed (which may be what you were
originally saying now that I look back, but I read it at first as the
citizen's not ackowledging the right either).

The counter-argument is that oppressive socities work to prevent their
citizens from expressing their desire for rights or selectively apply them,
which is all true. Without just laws and the instruments of justice to
enforce them, however, you cannot correct the problem. There is still an
acknowledgement on the part of society that things are wrong, and societal
problems eventually come to a head when the time is right else we wouldn't
be where we are and still not be where we need to go.

I'm not claiming that the world is an easy place to live in... : )

Matt

[Matt Garrish]

"Alan Connor" <i3*****@j9n35c .invalid> wrote in message
news:sl******** ************@b2 9x3m.invalid...

/kooks/alanconnor.shtm l

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up...

Matt