[Gllug] MS grumbles (was: take a lookat my photos on Facebook)

[Christopher Currie]

On 05 Nov 2009 12:05:28 +0000 Peter Cannon <peter at cannon-linux.co.uk> wrote:

> 
> Maybe, I don't know and to be honest don't care, what I do know is up
> until 10 years ago nobody moaned about Microsoft in fact everybody loved
> them.

'What I know not is not knowledge'?

This is 2009, not 1999. 

The big  US antitrust case against M$ was decided in 2000, and only the 
political interference of the Bushies stopped the company being broken up. The 
EU fined M$ E300 million for abuse of position some time after that - the 
company has still failed to pay.

People (Netscape since 1994, DRI and their successors since 1989 or earlier, 
and many users) had been 'bellyaching' against M$ long before that.

Ever looked at the Usenet newsgroup alt.windows95.crash.crash.crash?

Personally I've been bellyaching against M$ since 1983, when they (through 
DEC) sold my office, following my recommendation, a Basic compiler which was 
punted as handling 16-bit strings - it was precisely that facility that I 
needed and which made me recommend it. In fact it *corrupted* 16-bit strings 
and caused amazingly unpredictable crashes (well, the fact of crashing was 
predictable, the occasion was not)..

After I wrote and sent in a short program to prove it, they took 9 months to 
acknowledge the fact; then announced that they were not going to correct the 
fault in the next issue of the compiler, which they were about to thrust on an 
unsuspecting public; however, they'd correct it in the issue after that, which 
we'd be able to *buy* (no free replacement of something unfit for purpose).

The clunky workaround I had to write to cover their defect was still in use in 
2000, when, as stated, it looked as if the sh*ts had got their comeuppance. 
Not at all, no!

Someone wrote that Bill G decided against passwords in about 1989. No, 
presumably in 1980-1, when he bought what became MS-DOS. With the 8-bit OSs I 
was used to, I was *astonished* to discover, when I started having to use MS-
DOS, that it had no passwords.

The security problem is thus basically of Microsoft's making. Although no OS 
or application software is perfectly safe or hole-free, it takes a certain 
critical mass of insecurity, coupled with  market dominance, to encourage the 
development of a virus-and-malware-writing industry; the harder it is, the 
fewer kiddies will find the time to do it. (Some experimental viruses had been 
written for networks in the 1970s and micros in the 80s, but they didn't take 
off until MS-DOS ones started spreading in 1986. The notorious 'Morris 
Internet worm' - which ran on Unix systems - was in November 1988, *after* 
viruses had become widespread on M$ systems. ).


Christopher

-- 
Experience the poWer of Resistentialism

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