Yet again, Slashdot spews out anti-Microsoft FUD with as much fervor and skill as Microsoft spews out anti-Linux FUD.
So what? Isn't that ironic? Killing Microsoft with its own sword is another nuance of "an eye for an eye." It is interesting to note that Microsoft didn't even "innovate" the evil art of FUD. They just took it to new heights after IBM invented it. Now it is being turned on them, in spades. I believe that is what is called "poetic justice."
You bet I remember using DR DOS! At the time, I had an IBM PS/2 Model 50 computer which had a microchannel bus, a 20MG harddrive, and 1MB of RAM on the motherboard plus 8MB more RAM on an Acculogic memory board that fit into one of the PS/2 slots. That PS/2 used IBM's PS DOS 3.1, under license from MS-- it was essentially MS DOS licensed to IBM, that IBM had tightened up to perform better than MS DOS.
I attempted to install MS DOS ver 4.0 and then 5.0, but both times I gave up and returned to PC DOS 3.1, because it was just somehow better than any MS DOS-- it seemed to be more stable.
Then I tried DR DOS. I moved to DR DOS from the PC DOS 3.1 that had come bundled with the computer. Why? Because IBM PC DOS 3.1, was almost an identical copy (but slightly better quality) of MS DOS, and it lacked all the latest features of DR DOS. Neither PC DOS nor MS DOS had any form of disk compression, nor did MS even think about it before DR DOS bundled it; MS DOS did not have any memory management utility for RAM above 640k before DR DOS came out with a version bundled with a very effective utility for memory management. I used all of these extra features in DR DOS and they all worked beautifully. After DR DOS made their big splash with these features, MS tried to copy them (remember the Stacker lawsuit, which MS lost hands down when it was proved that MS had stolen Stacker's technology almost verbatim?) but MS's first effort using their stolen technology to defeat DR DOS in the marketplace was a total failure-- I believe it was MS DOS 5.0-- MS DOS had been a TOTAL bug-ridden failure. And ver 5.0 was rushed out to correct the bugs.
But MS DOS 5.0 was not much better. I believe it was MS DOS 5.0 that resulted in the Stacker suit that MS lost.
DR DOS was the one PC operating system that worked much better than anything that was coming from Microsoft at the time, no matter who it was licensed to (like IBM)-- and then somewhere around 1992, or maybe it was 1993, no one could get the latest version of Windows, the copycat GUI stolen from Apple that lay over DOS, to work with DR DOS. It was for that reason that I considered giving up using DR DOS, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it-- I rather just gave up the idea of using Windows.
DR DOS included a taskswapping GUI that looked different from Windows but allowed me to swap back and forth between several tasks in my 9MB total RAM, and it worked just like Windows was supposed to work, but without the "pretty" graphics that were just a cosmetic skin covering a rotten piece of fruit.
DR DOS booted faster and ran much, much faster than MS DOS, so I decided to hold out on upgrading my OS until OS/2 came out with version 2.1. I made the move to OS/2 in 1993 (or was it 94?) with its new ability to see and use all of the memory in your system, but I still hated to abandon DR DOS at that time, so I kept it on the 80286 PS/2 and installed OS/2 on the 250MB IDE harddrive that came with my new 80486DX2/66MhZ machine. That machine had come bundled with MS DOS and Windows 3.1 installed.
After the old PS/2 blew its video chip, around 1995, I installed DR DOS 6.0 on the 486 machine's newly upgraded 1.8GB SCSI hard drive along with OS/2.
Today, I run Linux on two machines-- the old 486 and a newer P133 with 128MB RAM and two-4.5 SCSI hard drives. There is a small partition (800 MB) for OS/2 on both machines for the DOS legacy programs such as Quicken. The 486 has Windows 3.11 and PC DOS 7.0 installed on a tiny 400 MB partition of the now total 3.5 MB SCSI hard drive on that machine-- it's harddrive has been upgraded again-- so my children can run their old Windows games.
The use of Windows is fading as the kids grow older and move more and more to OS/2 and now Linux to do their work. I can forsee wiping Windows 3.11 off both machines within the next few months.
DR DOS exists no longer on my machines-- I use OS/2's DOS virtual machine to do my legacy DOS stuff. I can't even find my DR DOS disks any longer.
All wooden tuns (252-gal capacity), barrels (31-gal capacity), and kegs (less than 10-gal capacity) have a round hole on one side of their bilge which is used to fill and then empty them of their liquid contents. This hole is called a bunghole and is plugged with a wooden bung driven tightly into the bunghole and then cut off flush with the stave. The contents of these containers could be cheap, or expensive, or whatever. They were used to ship all manner of liquids-- including wines, whiskys, cognacs, and olives and pickles in brine. The word ton comes from tun-- because a tun filled with whisky or other fermented spirits weighed the equivalent of what we call a ton today.
In an extremely short time I predict that we'll see the mighty PR machines spewing out garbage about how the case should be dropped because it is costing taxpayers "too much money".
There is one way to prevent Microsoft from using this to their advantage: Part of the settlement must be that Microsoft has to pay all of the DOJ's expenses for the entire antitrust suit.
USB is a technological step backwards. Its only reason to exist is to make connections of peripherals easy for idiots-- notice I did not say idiot-PROOF-- USB is not the great panacea Intel and Microsoft says it is. Plug-and-Play can stumble and fail with USB.
And consider that the highest speed USB is capable of only 12 Mbps, while ordinary SCSI can do 40 Mbps, Fast SCSI can do 80 Mbps, Ultra SCSI can do 160 Mbps and Firewire can do 400 Mbps.
"Well, the predicted crash never really happened- as of 11:00 MSFT was down only $2."
The price of Microsoft stock dropped 8+ points in after market trading, right after the judge's release of his FoF declaring MS a monopoly. That's when Limit Orders automatically kicked in, and the thousands of traders who had placed those Limit Orders prior to the release of Judge Jackson's FoF bought up thousands of shares at the lower price of $81. Now that the market has risen again due in large part to those Limit Orders, these traders have already made $8 a share, more or less, using this tactic. Besides the effect of these Limit Offers affecting MS's stock price, another cause of their stock going up is the shrewd tactic of MS buying back large blocks of its stock to keep the price up-- this is something they have done a lot in the past, and I have no doubt they are doing it now.
Watch MS over the next few weeks. You will see MS stock price slide, as traders sell it off and put their money into other tech stocks that are rising as a result of MS having been neutered in the field of technology predation.
The future does not look good for Microsoft. Expect to see a lot of lawsuits like Caldera's filed against them from all quarters in the next few months, now that the initial legal hurdle of proving them to be a monopoly has been given to MS's previous victims by Judge Jackson's FoF-- and the damages awarded in such lawsuits can be triple the amount asked for in the lawsuit.
Amazing! The judge decides that Microsoft has used totally immoral, totally unethical, totally brutal, totally unconscionable methods to achieve a position of near total monopoly of the PC operating system and office software business. But they must not be punished because they have a near total monopoly of the PC operating system and office software!
So Microsoft is going more insane with their outrageous pricing, and you think the answer is to pirate a copy of Win2k?
If you use even a pirated copy of Win2k you are still supporting it, even if not financially.
But Bill Gates doesn't need your money to survive. He would have to live 234 years past the normal human lifespan (84 years? That is assuming that with his money he can afford the best goat and monkey gland treatments in Switzerland to prolong his life) to spend the $100 billion he has today at $1,000,000 a day, and even after exhausting the original $100 billion base, he would have to live another human lifespan to dispose of the all the interest it would have earned by then. Bill Gates is going to find nearly impossible to GIVE AWAY all the money he now has in his lifetime. Of course, most of his wealth is in Microsoft stock-- i.e., all on paper-- which could be, and very likely will be devalued to practically zero over the next few years-- especially if Microsoft continues to lurch along on their wildly clueless path toward overpriced oblivion, as this latest pricing scheme for Win2k seems to suggest they are doing with wild abandon.
So, to reiterate, if you pirate Win2k, it will not affect Bill Gates fortunes in the least. But it WILL promote the life of Win2k, and ultimately Microsoft, a little longer.
You would be far wiser to completely abandon the use of any and all products from Microsoft if you want to see them cease to exist. Find the NON-Microsoft alternative programs that are available to run. You can do all of your word processing, personal account management, graphics manipulation, web browsing, web and software development, database management, and even play games using non-Microsoft dependent software. The list of non-Microsoft programs that run on a PC that will do most anything you want to do is huge, and it is growing larger every day. Of course, the extortionists in Redmond don't want you to know this.
You just have to find the alternatives to Microsoft and Microsoft dependent software-- and plenty of alternatives ARE available. But you can't expect to run Word, Excel, etc.
We once used Microsoft software, but we stopped at Windows 3.11. We still run it on one machine so that my six children (the youngest is 2, the oldest 17) can continue to use the large collection of Windows-dependent games that the family has purchased over the years. We NO LONGER buy any Microsoft products of any kind or Windows dependent software, including games, and have not for about two years. If the package says "Microsoft" or requires Windows 3.1/95/98/NT to run we do not buy it. And we are surviving very well, thank you, with two PCs in the house that do everything we require-- both of them are in use virtually all day long every day. One machine runs Windows 3.11 only when the kids want to play their Win-based games. Otherwise, that machine is booted into another operating system.
We run S.u.S.E. Linux 6.0 and OS/2 Warp 4.0 (with FixPack 9 installed-- it was free by the way, as all of OS/2's FixPacks are). S.u.S.E. 6.2 has just arrived in the mail, with 6 CDs of software for less than $60, and we will now be upgrading to it. Warp is still viable because we have an entire filing cabinet filled with hundreds of WordPerfect 4.2, 5.0, 5.2 and 6.0 documents and also DeScribe 5.0 documents, on floppies dating back to 1986, and we just don't want to take the time to convert them over to another format.
We use Quicken for DOS 7.0 for our personal accounts, and it runs under OS/2, with all of its functions available. We are glad to see that Quicken is going to come out with a version that will run under Linux, or so we have heard.
Eventually, we intend for all of our home computers to run everything under Linux alone-- And we are well on our way to doing that. Linux works very well for us. Each member of the family has his/her own user account, and only Dad has the superuser password.
Bill Gates is rich because he's a ruthless psychopath, totally unethical, and unwilling to let anyone who has something better than he has survive. And he has the power (massive paid-for public relations lies to dupe the public) and weapons (unfettered economic power over the entire PC computer industry) to force everyone involved in any business connected with the PC to do his bidding or die. If you are so impressed with money, then I imagine you also worship the lords of the drug cartels-- they too are obscenely rich, psychopathic, obsessively tyrannical, and greedy. Another common trait that Gates and the drug lords share, is that they are the very models of polite behavior when facing their "public". Gates steer the industry the way he sees fit? God help us all! What a complete clinical megalomaniac!
Slashdot Mirror
Yet again, Slashdot spews out anti-Microsoft FUD with as much fervor and skill as Microsoft spews out anti-Linux
FUD.
So what? Isn't that ironic? Killing Microsoft with its own sword is another nuance of "an eye for an eye." It is interesting to note that Microsoft didn't even "innovate" the evil art of FUD. They just took it to new heights after IBM invented it. Now it is being turned on them, in spades. I believe that is what is called "poetic justice."
You bet I remember using DR DOS! At the time, I had an IBM PS/2 Model 50 computer which had a microchannel bus, a 20MG harddrive, and 1MB of RAM on the motherboard plus 8MB more RAM on an Acculogic memory board that fit into one of the PS/2 slots. That PS/2 used IBM's PS DOS 3.1, under license from MS-- it was essentially MS DOS licensed to IBM, that IBM had tightened up to perform better than MS DOS.
I attempted to install MS DOS ver 4.0 and then 5.0, but both times I gave up and returned to PC DOS 3.1, because it was just somehow better than any MS DOS-- it seemed to be more stable.
Then I tried DR DOS. I moved to DR DOS from the PC DOS 3.1 that had come bundled with the computer. Why? Because IBM PC DOS 3.1, was almost an identical copy (but slightly better quality) of MS DOS, and it lacked all the latest features of DR DOS. Neither PC DOS nor MS DOS had any form of disk compression, nor did MS even think about it before DR DOS bundled it; MS DOS did not have any memory management utility for RAM above 640k before DR DOS came out with a version bundled with a very effective utility for memory management. I used all of these extra features in DR DOS and they all worked beautifully. After DR DOS made their big splash with these features, MS tried to copy them (remember the Stacker lawsuit, which MS lost hands down when it was proved that MS had stolen Stacker's technology almost verbatim?) but MS's first effort using their stolen technology to defeat DR DOS in the marketplace was a total failure-- I believe it was MS DOS 5.0-- MS DOS had been a TOTAL bug-ridden failure. And ver 5.0 was rushed out to correct the bugs.
But MS DOS 5.0 was not much better. I believe it was MS DOS 5.0 that resulted in the Stacker suit that MS lost.
DR DOS was the one PC operating system that worked much better than anything that was coming from Microsoft at the time, no matter who it was licensed to (like IBM)-- and then somewhere around 1992, or maybe it was 1993, no one could get the latest version of Windows, the copycat GUI stolen from Apple that lay over DOS, to work with DR DOS. It was for that reason that I considered giving up using DR DOS, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it-- I rather just gave up the idea of using Windows.
DR DOS included a taskswapping GUI that looked different from Windows but allowed me to swap back and forth between several tasks in my 9MB total RAM, and it worked just like Windows was supposed to work, but without the "pretty" graphics that were just a cosmetic skin covering a rotten piece of fruit.
DR DOS booted faster and ran much, much faster than MS DOS, so I decided to hold out on upgrading my OS until OS/2 came out with version 2.1. I made the move to OS/2 in 1993 (or was it 94?) with its new ability to see and use all of the memory in your system, but I still hated to abandon DR DOS at that time, so I kept it on the 80286 PS/2 and installed OS/2 on the 250MB IDE harddrive that came with my new 80486DX2/66MhZ machine. That machine had come bundled with MS DOS and Windows 3.1 installed.
After the old PS/2 blew its video chip, around 1995, I installed DR DOS 6.0 on the 486 machine's newly upgraded 1.8GB SCSI hard drive along with OS/2.
Today, I run Linux on two machines-- the old 486 and a newer P133 with 128MB RAM and two-4.5 SCSI hard drives. There is a small partition (800 MB) for OS/2 on both machines for the DOS legacy programs such as Quicken. The 486 has Windows 3.11 and PC DOS 7.0 installed on a tiny 400 MB partition of the now total 3.5 MB SCSI hard drive on that machine-- it's harddrive has been upgraded again-- so my children can run their old Windows games.
The use of Windows is fading as the kids grow older and move more and more to OS/2 and now Linux to do their work. I can forsee wiping Windows 3.11 off both machines within the next few months.
DR DOS exists no longer on my machines-- I use OS/2's DOS virtual machine to do my legacy DOS stuff. I can't even find my DR DOS disks any longer.
"GeForce" sounds German if you pronounce it with a hard "G"-- as in "nicht gepoken der finger in das hole-- ist verboten!"
All wooden tuns (252-gal capacity), barrels (31-gal capacity), and kegs (less than 10-gal capacity) have a round hole on one side of their bilge which is used to fill and then empty them of their liquid contents. This hole is called a bunghole and is plugged with a wooden bung driven tightly into the bunghole and then cut off flush with the stave. The contents of these containers could be cheap, or expensive, or whatever. They were used to ship all manner of liquids-- including wines, whiskys, cognacs, and olives and pickles in brine. The word ton comes from tun-- because a tun filled with whisky or other fermented spirits weighed the equivalent of what we call a ton today.
I find particularly amusing that you don't even bother to type correctly(ridicurous?).
Hey, chill out! Maybe he is oriental.
In an extremely short time I predict that we'll see the mighty PR machines spewing out garbage about how the case should be dropped because it is costing taxpayers "too much money".
There is one way to prevent Microsoft from using this to their advantage: Part of the settlement must be that Microsoft has to pay all of the DOJ's expenses for the entire antitrust suit.
USB is a technological step backwards. Its only reason to exist is to make connections of peripherals easy for idiots-- notice I did not say idiot-PROOF-- USB is not the great panacea Intel and Microsoft says it is. Plug-and-Play can stumble and fail with USB.
And consider that the highest speed USB is capable of only 12 Mbps, while ordinary SCSI can do 40 Mbps, Fast SCSI can do 80 Mbps, Ultra SCSI can do 160 Mbps and Firewire can do 400 Mbps.
You can keep your USB, thank-you.
"Well, the predicted crash never really happened- as of 11:00 MSFT was down only $2."
The price of Microsoft stock dropped 8+ points in after market trading, right after the judge's release of his FoF declaring MS a monopoly. That's when Limit Orders automatically kicked in, and the thousands of traders who had placed those Limit Orders prior to the release of Judge Jackson's FoF bought up thousands of shares at the lower price of $81. Now that the market has risen again due in large part to those Limit Orders, these traders have already made $8 a share, more or less, using this tactic. Besides the effect of these Limit Offers affecting MS's stock price, another cause of their stock going up is the shrewd tactic of MS buying back large blocks of its stock to keep the price up-- this is something they have done a lot in the past, and I have no doubt they are doing it now.
Watch MS over the next few weeks. You will see MS stock price slide, as traders sell it off and put their money into other tech stocks that are rising as a result of MS having been neutered in the field of technology predation.
The future does not look good for Microsoft. Expect to see a lot of lawsuits like Caldera's filed against them from all quarters in the next few months, now that the initial legal hurdle of proving them to be a monopoly has been given to MS's previous victims by Judge Jackson's FoF-- and the damages awarded in such lawsuits can be triple the amount asked for in the lawsuit.
Amazing! The judge decides that Microsoft has used totally immoral, totally unethical, totally brutal, totally unconscionable methods to achieve a position of near total monopoly of the PC operating system and office software business. But they must not be punished because they have a near total monopoly of the PC operating system and office software!
So Microsoft is going more insane with their outrageous pricing, and you think the answer is to pirate a copy of Win2k?
If you use even a pirated copy of Win2k you are still supporting it, even if not financially.
But Bill Gates doesn't need your money to survive. He would have to live 234 years past the normal human lifespan (84 years? That is assuming that with his money he can afford the best goat and monkey gland treatments in Switzerland to prolong his life) to spend the $100 billion he has today at $1,000,000 a day, and even after exhausting the original $100 billion base, he would have to live another human lifespan to dispose of the all the interest it would have earned by then. Bill Gates is going to find nearly impossible to GIVE AWAY all the money he now has in his lifetime. Of course, most of his wealth is in Microsoft stock-- i.e., all on paper-- which could be, and very likely will be devalued to practically zero over the next few years-- especially if Microsoft continues to lurch along on their wildly clueless path toward overpriced oblivion, as this latest pricing scheme for Win2k seems to suggest they are doing with wild abandon.
So, to reiterate, if you pirate Win2k, it will not affect Bill Gates fortunes in the least. But it WILL promote the life of Win2k, and ultimately Microsoft, a little longer.
You would be far wiser to completely abandon the use of any and all products from Microsoft if you want to see them cease to exist. Find the NON-Microsoft alternative programs that are available to run. You can do all of your word processing, personal account management, graphics manipulation, web browsing, web and software development, database management, and even play games using non-Microsoft dependent software. The list of non-Microsoft programs that run on a PC that will do most anything you want to do is huge, and it is growing larger every day. Of course, the extortionists in Redmond don't want you to know this.
You just have to find the alternatives to Microsoft and Microsoft dependent software-- and plenty of alternatives ARE available. But you can't expect to run Word, Excel, etc.
We once used Microsoft software, but we stopped at Windows 3.11. We still run it on one machine so that my six children (the youngest is 2, the oldest 17) can continue to use the large collection of Windows-dependent games that the family has purchased over the years. We NO LONGER buy any Microsoft products of any kind or Windows dependent software, including games, and have not for about two years. If the package says "Microsoft" or requires Windows 3.1/95/98/NT to run we do not buy it. And we are surviving very well, thank you, with two PCs in the house that do everything we require-- both of them are in use virtually all day long every day. One machine runs Windows 3.11 only when the kids want to play their Win-based games. Otherwise, that machine is booted into another operating system.
We run S.u.S.E. Linux 6.0 and OS/2 Warp 4.0 (with FixPack 9 installed-- it was free by the way, as all of OS/2's FixPacks are). S.u.S.E. 6.2 has just arrived in the mail, with 6 CDs of software for less than $60, and we will now be upgrading to it. Warp is still viable because we have an entire filing cabinet filled with hundreds of WordPerfect 4.2, 5.0, 5.2 and 6.0 documents and also DeScribe 5.0 documents, on floppies dating back to 1986, and we just don't want to take the time to convert them over to another format.
We use Quicken for DOS 7.0 for our personal accounts, and it runs under OS/2, with all of its functions available. We are glad to see that Quicken is going to come out with a version that will run under Linux, or so we have heard.
Eventually, we intend for all of our home computers to run everything under Linux alone-- And we are well on our way to doing that. Linux works very well for us. Each member of the family has his/her own user account, and only Dad has the superuser password.
Bill Gates is rich because he's a ruthless psychopath, totally unethical, and unwilling to let anyone who has something better than he has survive. And he has the power (massive paid-for public relations lies to dupe the public) and weapons (unfettered economic power over the entire PC computer industry) to force everyone involved in any business connected with the PC to do his bidding or die. If you are so impressed with money, then I imagine you also worship the lords of the drug cartels-- they too are obscenely rich, psychopathic, obsessively tyrannical, and greedy. Another common trait that Gates and the drug lords share, is that they are the very models of polite behavior when facing their "public". Gates steer the industry the way he sees fit? God help us all! What a complete clinical megalomaniac!
I heard that thought stated a bit differently: "Money is not everything-- but if you have a lot of it, you can BUY everything."